Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  The next morning, he arrived at the institute at nine-forty-five, having threaded his way through the industrial landscape with its slogans of hate and violent partisanship, the passions of the bazaar alive here along the Seine, around the corner from the Notre Dame, the university. The professor had suggested they meet at the top, and as he rose through floor after floor in the elevator, rising through Mitterrand’s folly, he felt as if he were a character in some inscription, ascending along the walls of what seemed one great passage from the Quran. Until, at the top, the message ran out, and there was nothing but the sky.

  He looked out from the rooftop at the steeples and spires studded across the grey skyline, their crosses like headstones in some cemetery built above the clouds. Around him, the canvas umbrellas at the tables, white and folded, looked like nuns huddled in the rain, all the more so as bells began pealing hosannas from the nearby church.

  Inside the spacy grey cafeteria where the man had told him to appear, the hexagons and stars from the patterned windows threw strange shadows across the floor, and he felt more than ever as if he were a cipher in some geometrical design, who had meaning only if put together with the coats lined up on the racks, the modular chairs, the woven shadows. “Sometimes you are inside a circle when you think you are outside it”: the unsettling words of the stranger in Seville.

  The room was not very crowded at this early hour, and he did not imagine it would be difficult to spot the itinerant scholar. An elegant Frenchwoman was sitting alone at one table, throwing her Eastern shawl across one shoulder as she paged through a fashion magazine, brown eyes stylishly lined with kohl (he saw Sophie in a future life). At another table, a group of men from the Middle East were huddled together in dark jackets and grey trousers, as if chatting about the latest threat in Jerusalem, or Homs. The professor, when he came in a few minutes later, belonged to another order: cream sweater, aviator glasses, and a worn leather book-bag over his shoulder. His well-coiffed hair was grey, and his jacket, light for summer, was obviously expensive.

  “So—you have ordered already?”

  “I waited. What can I get you?”

  “Café, only.” He put down his things and said, “Monsieur Hussein is your friend?”

  “Acquaintance. I went to look at his manuscript—a little before you did, I think.”

  “Ah yes, the manuscript.”

  The mint tea, the café au lait arrived, and he felt the man waiting for a prompt.

  “As I said over the phone, I’ve actually found myself changing places with Mr. Hussein. I’m now where he was.”

  “You have a manuscript?”

  “I have something. Whether it’s a manuscript or not—”

  “Yes, of course,” said the man. “Perhaps I cannot help, but I am interested.”

  He pulled out the four pages of photocopies and passed them over; if everyone he consulted saw the same pages, he could read each one’s level of involvement.

  The man took off his glasses, “YSL” on their sides, rubbed his eyes, and put them on again.

  He sipped his tea, and waited for an answer.

  “This is in confidence, no?”

  “Of course. I’m grateful to you for even looking at them.”

  “Of course.” A small, elegant bow. “What do you think they are?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Some, as you can see, are Rumi; the others, I don’t know.”

  “I, too. They are interesting, certainly. They have the same flavor, the same spices, but the taste is different.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I would like to work with them. If you have the whole manuscript, perhaps you can give it to me and, three weeks, four weeks later, I send you an answer.”

  The book had been a gift; and perhaps, too, a treasure. It was a private act, which somehow he was dragging into the public arena.

  “The whole manuscript is in California at the moment. I’m reluctant to carry it around.”

  “Of course. But for me, you understand, I cannot say anything with so little. You want my advice, but you cannot show me what you have. It is the débâcle of the times: Dzogchen sutras on the rue St.-Jacques.”

  He looked up at the unusual phrase, and remembered where he’d seen it before: the fiery article on global scatterings that Mowbray had given him from the scholarly journal. By someone, he remembered now, who taught art history in Paris, and so was unfamiliar to him.

  “I think I’ve read something of yours,” he said to the man. “ ‘Postmortems in the Postmodern Era,’ something like that.”

  “Yes,” said the professor, shrugging, “a favor for a friend. A friend in America.”

  “You wrote a whole article as a favor?”

  “I let him use my name. The terms are his.”

  “You had an arrangement?”

  “A private arrangement,” said the man, as if that was the way to end the discussion.

  “And in terms of my manuscript . . . ?”

  “In terms of your manuscript, I wait till you give me everything, then I tell you what you have.”

  “I’ll try to do that later. First I need to know if it’s authentic.”

  The man stood up, his pride clearly bruised. “I thank you for the coffee,” he said, with more formality than was called for. “I think you need to talk to somebody else. I will ask Aisha Crespelle if she has time to see you.”

  Wild Arabic music swirled out of the little shrine decorated in the shape of a peacock. Around him, once more, the kind of atmosphere he might have seen in the teahouse at the eastern entrance of the Umayyad Mosque: men in ancient jackets gathered over what seemed to be a perpetual argument; a grave old man alone, sipping at his tea as if wanting to stretch the cup out through a lifetime; a whirling, hypnotic melody that sang of love and desolation.

  He thought of his adviser, planting articles in magazines, it seemed, much as he had planted Pauline in Arizona; getting professors in France to put their names on what he’d written, as he got small presses in Los Angeles to publish the pieces in English. For all he knew, Sefadhi was working through Camilla to give his prize student a manuscript that—nothing seemed impossible—his adviser had written himself.

  Aisha Crespelle was dressed in a blue blazer and grey slacks and— what he hadn’t expected from her first name—had a healthy blond ponytail that spoke of a house in the country, riding lessons at dawn. He ordered tea for them both, and she looked back at him across the table in the Parisian way: appraising him sexually as much as socially, and hardly bothering to conceal her surprise at his relative youth and lack of funds.

  “I imagine Professor Richy explained why I am here?”

  “Of course,” she said. “He always does.”

  The “always” wasn’t encouraging, but he pressed on: “My adviser, Javad Sefadhi, is second to none in his admiration of your work.”

  “I thank him,” she said.

  She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her bag as the tea arrived, and a thin gold lighter. At the next table, a noisy group of young girls from Scandinavia were untethering old backpacks.

  “I hear you have poems. But what do you want me to do with them? Do I look at them and then pretend I’ve never seen them? You show me something beautiful, and then I never see it again?”

  “I was thinking we might come to terms.”

  “‘Come to terms,’” she said. “And if the poems are fakes, then what?”

  “That’s a chance you have to take. If they’re fakes, I’ve come all the way from California in vain.”

  “Why me? There are other people more eminent than myself. Maybe I will read your poems and then tell you they are worthless and make use of them myself ?”

  “That’s a chance I have to take. Those doubts apply to anyone I might consult.”

  “Show me what you have,” she said, tired of the fencing, and tipping her ash impatiently into the Cinzano tray. “Show me what you have so I can have some idea of it.”

  “These are the o
nly poems I have with me.”

  “Yes,” she said, taking them from him, and then going through them once, twice, returning again and again to the second page. “Yes. These are something.”

  “Something important?”

  “Something different. What you should do with them, I can tell you without payment.”

  He looked at her encouragingly.

  “You burn them. Now. Before you leave Paris. If you keep the others in California, as soon as you return to California.” She took a long drag on her cigarette—smoking was how people in Paris punctuated their conversations. “The people to whom these poems belong have suffered already.” He’d guessed from her first name that she came from somewhere in the Middle East, and her watchfulness, her briskness said something about what she’d lived through. He thought back to the Iranians he’d met in Los Angeles, and the shards of a former life among which they tiptoed.

  “These poems are like a bomb in a crowded square.”

  “I realize that. I just wanted to know what they are exactly. For private reasons.”

  “For private reasons you do not come to me.” She sat back and looked at him for a long moment.

  “I have a friend,” she said, “an old friend from Tehran. One month ago, he goes back to collect the things he left in his house when he left. It is all gone—taken by a friend, an enemy, the police, some criminals, he doesn’t know. Then he goes to the airport to leave. ‘Sorry,’ they say as he’s leaving. ‘You are free to leave, but this little girl with you, she must stay.’ ‘But she is my daughter.’ ‘You say she is your daughter. How do we know she is not someone you are taking away from Iran?’ ‘I show you her passport, her papers. I give you the DNA.’ ‘We are sorry. You are free to go. But the girl, she must stay here.’ ”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in the metal tray. “If you have a love letter, you do not take it to the government.” If someone whispers in your ear, you don’t ask a stranger what it means. Least of all in a country where whispers have repercussions.

  Back in his little room, he picked up the postcard of the mosque he’d bought. He looked at it and looked out the window. Then, as if to renew an old hope he’d put away for a long time, he wrote on the back,

  Wherever there is a ruin, there is a hope for treasure.

  —JALALUDDIN RUMI

  When he got back to Santa Barbara, the only message waiting for him was from Sefadhi, speaking as if through clenched teeth. “In light of your new discovery, I have effected an extension of the fellowship; a stay of execution, if you like. The papers will be with the IRS soon. I hope you can put this year of grace to happy use.”

  There were no letters in the mailbox, no faxes curling out of the machine. He put his carry-on back in the closet, and as he did so he saw, stacked in the corner, the letters from her he’d put where he wouldn’t see them. He bent down to pick one up, saw a face smiling at him through a windshield, and put the envelope quickly back.

  The autumn days passed smoothly, tonelessly, and he began at last to pick up the pieces of his life and put them into a kind of order again: on Thursday nights tennis with Dick, movies once a week, and the trek to the library every morning at seven-forty-five. With an extension of twelve months, he could go back to the glass of wine in the terrace in the evenings, the occasional consultation of poems he hadn’t read for a long time. They’d run away from him when he looked at them again—as Sefadhi had, and Camilla; as he himself had, perhaps—but he was stirred by the same cadences he remembered from what seemed a previous lifetime.

  Camilla sent no letters, and made no calls; no doubt she was hiding in someone else’s apartment now, putting whatever concerned her where she would never have to see it. He stepped around the books, the places they’d seen together, and it felt sometimes as if he was living on the outskirts of himself, at a safe distance from the tumult of the inner city.

  The new last chapter on calligraphy was easy enough to complete— writing itself as a kind of art, so just the transcribing of the holy words, the copying of them, became a prayer—and he devoted most of it to the master calligraphers who managed, in all their work, to leave some trace of themselves, some hidden signature, and yet to take everything else of themselves out of their creations, as if they’d had no part in them. A few days before Christmas, he completed the last sentence of the dissertation, and looked up to realize that, thanks to the extension, he was now six months ahead of schedule, instead of six months behind.

  One chilly afternoon, just after the New Year, a card arrived from her—an image from a Persian manuscript, of course, now kept in Oxford—and inside it, in the familiar looping scrawl, she wrote, “I hope you’re doing well. I’m not so great. I lost the best chance I ever had. I don’t expect another one very soon. Your fond admirer, Camilla Jensen.”

  In the same mail, another card, in the antiquated blue-black script he remembered from his undergraduate days, made out to “John Macmillan, Esq.”—and inside, a Renaissance picture of a Florentine Virgin, her ornate blue shawl, imported from Arabia, covered with Arabic characters that said, “There is no god but God” (his old professor’s idea of a joke, no doubt).

  I was very happy to receive news of your completed thesis; well done. I wonder whether you shouldn’t go to Persia now you’ve met your obligations towards it. Not that you will necessarily find much there; but until you do go, you shall always think you might.

  Gratuitous advice from a superannuated counsellor.

  With warm regards,

  Benedict Mowbray.

  Christmas had been quiet, and over the New Year, celebrations had seemed inappropriate: one year before, he’d been in the Taj, slipping under the surface of the world to find the secret flame burning in the basement; a year from now, whatever happened, he’d be in another country—the fellowship stipulated that much—and the poems that had kept him company for all these years would be behind him. He thought sometimes of the book in the bank, and put the thought away.

  Outside, the light had resumed its winter sharpness, as if someone were outlining every detail with a razor-point black pen, so the days were particular in a way they could never be in the broad-brush summer. Sharpness in the elements highlighting uncertainty everywhere else.

  He’d set aside the whole of January for putting together his footnotes—tidying up the loose ends of the thesis—and after the early months of restlessness, he was beginning to recapture the gift of sleep. Sometimes whole weeks would go by without a night of sleeplessness. One night, when the phone began ringing in the dark, he got up as if still asleep and stumbled through the room.

  “Hello,” he said, and there was nothing.

  “Hello,” he said, and was about to put the phone down—a student prank, he assumed—when he heard something at the other end, not so much a voice as a sound, so distant it felt as if it were coming from the far side of the world. He had a vague image of bells in New Mexico, and waking up in the predawn quiet to look at the stars through the window, after a dream of Isfahan.

  “Camilla,” he said slowly. “Is that you?”

  He heard only low breathing at the other end, and then what sounded like choking, or someone laughing so hard she couldn’t get the words out.

  “Camilla, is that you? What’s happening?”

  She didn’t say a thing, and he imagined someone shuddering, speechless, at the other end. He thought of the time once when they’d come so close to breaking one another that he’d gone out to take a walk before the damage would be irreversible. When he’d come back, he’d seen her through the window, in the long black dress she’d put on for a special occasion, sprawled across the bed, shaking convulsively, as if in a fit, her small hands fisted at her sides. As haunting a sight as he’d ever seen, of someone locked into a small space with the person she most feared (herself).

  “I was hoping you would call,” he said now, to try to draw her out. “I’ve been wanting to hear your voice.”

  “My father’s dead.”<
br />
  “What’s that?”

  “My father’s dead! Can’t you hear anything? They found him in his study.” She cackled in a wild way, and he realized that what he was hearing was the opposite of laughter. “It was the excitement of his birthday, the doctor said. Going out on a high note.” And she shrieked again, as if it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  “I’ll be right there. Are you at home?”

  “Don’t!” she said into the receiver. “Don’t come any closer! Stay where you are.”

  He stopped for a moment, to let her retrieve herself.

  “You need someone, Camilla,” he said at last, when she said nothing. “Someone who cares for you.”

  “If I need someone who cares for me, I don’t need you. Come any closer and I’ll kill you.”

  He let her cry, or get out whatever was inside her, and then just said, “If there’s anything you need, I’m here. If you want something, anything at all, just tell me.”

  “Whatever I need, it isn’t you.” And the phone came slamming down around him.

  There was no getting to sleep after that; he thought of her alone, in a city haunted by the person she saw as her tormentor, he imagined her putting on her long dress slowly. A few hours later, while it was still dark, there came a knock on the door and, half expecting it, he went to the side door and let her in. Her face was ash, and her white skin against the white dress gave the impression of someone who couldn’t touch the ground.

  He held her briefly, and she fumbled past him. “I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I didn’t know where to go.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. You’re safe. What can I get you?”

  And then, realizing that what she needed most was a freedom from all choice, he led her into the bedroom and made a space for her.

  “Is there anything you’d like?”

  “A new father.” Her voice was still strange, as over the telephone. “I think I need to sleep.”

  “Sleep; I’ll be here beside you.”

  He sat beside her as she lay and saw her fall into another space. It had been a long time since he’d seen her in this position, smelled her face cream, watched the calm that stole over her face when she was resting. She stirred once, a few minutes after she’d nodded off, and he put a hand out to assure her he was there. Awake, it had seemed as if some aspirant Camilla was in his room, the amateur actress come once more; asleep, it was her again in his bed.