. . . I looked down to the oblong rooms I had excavated. I saw the graves, the bones, the stone dishes, the pottery that had shattered. I reached down and picked up a fragment of a woman’s comb. Everything about these people, their beliefs and their thoughts, their feelings—all had disappeared. No one even knew they existed until I came.
Oh, Claire! It was magnificent. This was the largest city in the world at the dawn of the urban era. This was an advanced culture, so advanced. It was the meeting point of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, and China.
Did you know, Claire, that on my last dig there, I uncovered the earliest evidence of brain surgery?
When I expressed my surprise—I had never even heard of the Burnt City, to my embarrassment—he sent me the link to the paper he had published about it in the Athena Review. Reading his byline, I realized that he had been modest about his career: he was the leading Iranian authority on the third millennium BC and the author of a three-volume history of Mesopotamia.
It’s not unusual to encounter someone who has lived through events like those of his childhood, but it is unusual to encounter someone who can recount them in one’s own language. I’m sure the Vietnamese woman who sold spring rolls at the dingy Asian cafeteria down the street from me in Paris had stories every bit as dramatic to tell, but when I asked her about them, the linguistic barriers between us had proved insuperable. After trying and failing to make herself understood in broken French, she had resorted to sign language, making a slicing motion across her throat.
I grew more bold in my questions. What, I asked, did he think of the Iranian Revolution now? I wasn’t sure whether he would reply, but his answer was frank:
. . . I am of many emotions, mostly sad and angry ones, but I am not like the Iranians who believe life was very beautiful under the Shah. When people learn that I was once in London, sometimes they make a little speech. “Oh, I’ve been to London, it was in 1351! I went there with my wife and my children for Norooz! I even remember Hyde Park!One pound was twelve Tomans at that time; you could spend money so easily, and now? It’s 1600 Tomans! What a pity, you see this beautiful city, center of art and culture of the East, what’s happened here? They’ve ruined things!Before, people were happy, they had good lives, easy lives, then the Revolution, the war . . . now everyone’s nervous, people don’t even smile . . . Before, an Iranian was an important person, when we went to London, everybody spread red carpets before us when we told them we were Iranians, but now, when you say you’re Iranian, what comes to their minds are mullahs and terrorism. They’ve taken away all our credit in the world.” They say this and I nod politely, but I remember that not long after we arrived in London we received word that my cousin had been tortured to death. My mother wept for weeks when we learned the news. . . .
I asked him next what he thought of the protesters on the streets of Iran demanding democracy, but to this question he didn’t respond. I did not ask again. Perhaps, I thought, he felt it unwise to commit those thoughts to paper. That certainly would have been understandable. Instead, I asked him if he’d ever thought of returning to the West.
. . . Yes, Claire, I was offered a fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies once in London. But I did not take it. The Soviet empire had collapsed, and students were demonstrating in China. I dreamed the whole world would change. My country would change with it.
Perhaps I missed that chance. But I am not a political man; I am a man who sifts through time. There is no better place in the world to be an archaeologist than Iran. It is my home, and it is my ancestors’ home. I would not want to sit in the coffeehouses in London mourning the Peacock Throne with the exiled ghouls who introduce themselves with their old titles: “Sohrab Kadivar, Minister of the Navy!”
I am not English. I will never be English. So, what to say. I am an outsider everywhere. In Iran, at least, there is black tea, and the smell of frankincense, and flat bread with feta cheese and fresh herbs. Everyone here knows Hafez and Rumi and Sa‘di. From my window I see the minarets of Isfahan.
It is not the best of all possible worlds. Nor is it the worst.
It seems hard to believe now, but not once did it cross my mind in those early days—not consciously, at any rate—to think of our correspondence as a romance. It was an odd friendship, one made entertaining and pleasurable for me by his combination of obvious intelligence and his exoticism, but I thought of him as a confessor and a curiosity, not as a lover, and it did not seem to me urgently important to know exactly what he looked like, or even to imagine what it would be like to meet him in the flesh.
It was just a way to pass the time, and it beat working.
CHAPTER THREE
This looks like an insider’s account.
—ROBERT BAER,
former CIA case officer, about Loose Lips
If you live in Paris, sooner or later all of your friends show up. Charlene showed up the next weekend, prancing through the towering mahogany-and-bronze doors of the Hotel Meurice, laden with shopping bags and babbling into her cell phone. “I gotta go; my friend’s already here,” she said to the phone, then snapped it shut. “Claire! I can’t believe you live in this gorgeous city!”
To judge from the hotel she was staying in, Coca-Cola was treating my friend well. The lobby had recently been remodeled in the style of the Napoleonic Empress Eugénie’s ballroom. Overlooking the Tuileries, the Meurice had been the headquarters of the Gestapo during the Occupation. Doors were opened and cigarettes lit for guests as if General von Choltitz still ran the show.
Charlene was in Paris for a bottling conference. She had joined Coca-Cola’s international marketing division soon after losing her job at the CIA; eventually Coke had posted her to Eastern Europe, where she thrived. Soon she was running the marketing operations of Coca-Cola Bottlers in Slovenia, and recently she had been promoted to a senior position in the Czech Republic. She had called me that morning to tell me that she was in town. Was I free for lunch? Of course I was.
Usually, people who visit Paris want to see the Louvre and the Champs Elysées, but Charlene had other plans: she wanted to go to the African fish market in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. “It’s the world capital of hair weaves.” She left her bags with one of the cowed employees at the front desk and took me by the arm, babbling excitedly in her scattershot, distracted fashion about the fabric samples she’d bought for her curtains, the men she was dating, and the way there was nothing wrong with the bottling plant in Belgium, the toxicology reports had come back totally negative, it was all completely psychosomatic, but you just try convincing these hysterical Europeans of that. I barely said a word.
I’d never been to the fish market and was amazed when we stepped out of the Métro and found ourselves in a neighborhood that looked the way I imagined Senegal would, only noisier and more crowded. Even the drug dealers were dressed in dashikis and headdresses. In the back-alley shops the fortune tellers and the Sangomas were throwing bones. Charlene was delighted to discover she could buy bootleg cassettes of Papa Wemba and M’Pongo Love—as well as an authentic sanza hand piano—from the old African men who materialized on the street corners the second the police van was out of eyeshot and dematerialized just as quickly when it came back. A fishmonger named Mama Osibisa answered Charlene’s questions about how to prepare the foufou from Cameroon, and she told us we could sample the second-best in Paris if we went to the restaurant without a name down the street. It had a secret door; she told us to look for the leopard curtains.
The restaurant was just where Mama Osibisa said it would be. Canvas sacks of plantains, okra, and weird root vegetables that I’d never seen before were stacked up in huge piles on the stairs leading to the dining room in the cellar; its tiny tables were lit with kerosene lanterns. The cook was shouting at a monkey scampering among the rum bottles over the counter: “Fou le camp, Dr. Nkrumah!” The room was tiny but packed with drunken customers singing along to the Zouk music from the jukebox. A stout woman dressed in a grande
boubou brought a plastic bucket of silver baby sharks into the kitchen, carrying them on her head.
After we ordered, I gave Charlene a brief sitrep on Jimmy. When I got to the part about Jimmy telling me that my love didn’t nurture, she said, “Well, don’t you have a talent for finding men who’re dumber than a sack of hair.” The foufou arrived at the table. “Never mind him,” she said. “Who are you seeing now?” When I told her I wasn’t seeing anyone, she was horrified. “Do you mean to tell me you just sit in front of your computer all day long?”
We took the Métro back to the Tuileries, then walked through the garden and over the Seine. As we walked she told me about a Slovenian gymnastics medalist with whom she’d just spent a particularly acrobatic weekend, “and, honey, would you just look at this beautiful view!” She stood at the edge of the Pont des Arts, throwing her arms wide with delight. “It looks just like the movies!”
It did, too.
Since we weren’t far away, I suggested we take tea at Mariage Frères. “Sure, my treat,” she said. “I’ll put it on the card and tell Coca-Cola we were discussing the size of your refrigerator. Did you know we had to withdraw our two-liter bottles from Spain because their fridges are too small? Can you imagine?” I wondered if I could fit a two-liter bottle in my own refrigerator; I doubted it. “But we’re still beating Pepsi like a rented mule,” she added reassuringly, misinterpreting my expression. “Oh, would you look at this!”
We’d arrived at the tea shop. Most of the tables were filled by Japanese tourists dressed in the latest absurd Issey Miyake collection. In the corner sat a deathly pale man in a silk smoking jacket and slippers, with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder, slowly waving a silk-screened fan. We both tried not to stare.
There were more than five hundred varieties of tea according to the menu, which was printed in a turn-of-the-century typeface and designed to look like an expensive private wine list. Each tea had an exotic name—Cloud Temple, Himalayan Pavilion—and an exotic story: Full Moon tea, for example, was inspired by the heavenly bodies and the realm of dreams, and it was—I quote—a moonbeam of a tea, a poetic blend combining fragrances evoking the feast of the full moon, an enrapturing bouquet of bergamot oil, rare Laotian spices, and a touch of Mirabelle plum from the north of France.
The waiters wafted by with steaming pots and silver trays of golden madeleines. One of them presented himself at our table with a slight bow. “Mesdames?” I ordered the first tea on the menu, the Darjeeling Nouveau (an exceptional limited edition pressing, apparently, from the first harvest of the garden of Ambootia), and a crème brûlée infused with the Solitary Poet’s Tea of Tibet. The waiter nodded gravely and turned to Charlene. “Et vous, Madame?”
“I’ll have a Coke,” she said. The waiter fixed Charlene with a dismal gaze, but when she met his eyes and stared him down he lost his nerve and shuffled off with a dejected “Oui, Madame.”
As we waited for our refreshments we chatted about both members of the Slovenian jet set, fabric samples for her curtains, and the latest gossip from the CIA. “Now, how do we get you back into circulation?” Charlene asked. “You could take out an ad on the Internet, you know. My sister met a really sweet fella that way.”
I wasn’t sure about that—Samantha’s accounts of Internet dating certainly weren’t the best advertisement for it. I told her about my friendship with Samantha and her forays onto Nerve.com. Charlene was fascinated when I recounted Samantha’s adventures, but she couldn’t figure out why I trusted her. “If she lies to all these people, how do you know she’s not lying to you, too?” she asked. “Maybe she’s really a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man? The Internet is full of lying freaks.”
I thought this was a bit rich, coming from someone who used to live under cover and lie for a living herself. I shrugged. “How can I be sure you’re not still in the CIA? Maybe you just said they fired you so you could go under really deep cover.”
“Yeah, right. Seriously, I don’t get it. Don’t you at least want to meet this Samantha person before you tell her all this intimate stuff?”
“What difference would it make? I write to lots of people without having met them.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Why not?” I told her about Arsalan, and his lovely descriptions of Isfahan and the Burnt City.
“An Iranian guy? You live in the City of Lights, the most romantic city in the world, and you’re playing footsie with some Iranian guy over the Internet?”
“I’m not playing footsie; I just write to him.”
“How often?”
“Now and again.”
“Now and again? You just described every street, bridge, and mousehole in Isfahan. You need to go on a date. A real one.” For a moment, she was distracted by the man with the stuffed parrot on his shoulder, who for no obvious reason began flapping his fan wildly around his head. “Honey, what did you say that place was again? Bird City?”
“The Burnt City.” To change the subject, I asked her if she’d ever heard what happened to her old boyfriend, the one she thought had reported her to security.
“I really like to think,” she said, licking a bit of tea-scented crème brûlée from her varnished fingernail, then sipping the last drops from the cup of tea I had convinced her to try—a blend called Opium Hill, a rose and ginger “meditation,” according to the menu, cultivated in a Tibetan monastery and transported to Paris via caravan—“that he’s freezing his constipated ass off in some cave in Afghanistan, worrying about his promotion panel and eating a yak bladder.”
• • •
Samantha had sent me links to the profiles of the women with whom she was corresponding: There was Vertigo, who thought strong, soft, wet lips were sexy, but feeling them on her own strong, soft, wet lips was sexier, and Missbehave, who wrote that the five items she couldn’t live without were trust, love, and kindness. (She lived fine without the ability to count beyond three, apparently.) Vertigo hadn’t answered the question about the last good book she’d read, and Samantha suspected this was because she had never read one. Missbehave had written that it was Five Simple Steps to Emotional Healing.
Over the past few weeks, however, Samantha had also been writing to a woman on Nerve.com named Lynne, and her interest in Lynne, she confessed to me, was more than anthropological. Lynne, according to her profile, had just finished John Blofeld’s City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking’s Exotic Pleasures. Her photograph showed a woman of an almost consumptive pallor with a high, curved forehead and a slightly weak chin. But it was her eyes that had captured Samantha’s imagination. Samantha kept above her computer a reproduction of a 1765 pen-and-ink sketch of Voltaire at his writing desk. Lynne’s eyes, Samantha thought, looked remarkably like Voltaire’s. I had looked at them myself: they were pitch-black and small, like nuggets of coal.
. . . and, Claire, Lynne’s letters are even cleverer than her eyes. Do you know what she told me this morning? She told me that deaf people with Tourette’s syndrome tic in sign language! Isn’t that fascinating? . . .
The two women had been corresponding for several weeks, although only one of them realized that they were both women; the other thought she was writing to a man. Lynne lived in a cabin near Big Sur, so they had not yet met. Although it was the logical next step, Samantha found herself hesitant to propose a meeting. She feared that in person, Lynne would either be what she seemed to be, or she wouldn’t—and in the first case, she would meet an enormously desirable woman who desired her, but only as the man she was not; in the latter, she would meet yet another woman who disappointed her.
A message from Samantha was waiting for me when I returned from my day with Charlene. She was wondering if perhaps the connection between her and Lynne might be strong enough for Lynne to overcome her heterosexuality.
. . . lots of women surprise themselves by falling in love with other women. I didn’t realize I was a lesbian at all until I was in college. It only became clear to me
when one night I had a dream that I was sitting at the breakfast table in my bathrobe, drinking tea with Martha Nussbaum.
Arsalan was writing to me when he should have been working. I was writing to Samantha when I should have been working. Samantha was writing to Lynne when she should have been working. “What would a real love letter from her be like?” Samantha wondered. She had not written a word of her book that day, she complained: “I’m still in my pajamas. I’m a loser and I hate myself.”
Of course, it’s not as if busy people with more active jobs are immune to rogue fantasies and vagrant infatuations. Imran, the busiest man I’d ever known, had also met a woman who seemed to him exceptional. He had known Larissa for only three minutes and one dinner date—he had met her on his second speed-dating session—but according to the e-mail he had sent me while I was out with Charlene, she was
. . . a dream come true, and we’re going forward. I’m so excited and lovestruck. I can imagine her pregnant and waddling around the kitchen. No problem parents, they’re both dead.
I was glad to hear him sound so happy, but astounded—and slightly worried—by his tone. I’d never heard him say anything quite like that; this was Imran, after all, who generally discussed the categories of love with the taxonomic precision of an Eskimo discussing snow. “The word love,” he had written to me not so very long ago,
. . . should not even be applied to the emotions experienced by people in the honeymoon stage of a relationship, which can last up to eighteen months and tends to last six to nine. The correct terms are sexual attraction, projection, fantasy, fixation, idealization, and infatuation.
I suppose knowing the weaknesses of the human psyche is no proof against succumbing to them, which is why analysts are themselves obliged to undergo analysis. I hoped his therapist was on top of this situation; I certainly didn’t want to be the one to rain on his projected, fixated parade.
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