Lion Eyes

by Claire Berlinski

  Samantha had written, too, wondering why I hadn’t answered her letter. She and Lynne had been speaking on the phone every night, she added. During their last conversation, Lynne told her that she had gone for an HIV test and hoped Sam would do the same. When the time came, said Lynne, she didn’t want condoms to spoil their intimacy.

  “They won’t,” Samantha said glumly. “I can promise you that.”

  She didn’t know how to break the news. In a letter? In person? What should she do if Lynne became hysterical? She was so anxious that her therapist had urged her to titrate up the Paxil. She wasn’t sure she should; last time she did that, it had made her so manic that she’d shoplifted three kilos of T-bone steak. “Then somehow I wound up in a nude photo session in front of about twenty people I didn’t know on a red velvet couch with an albino python wrapped around me.”

  She didn’t really need to hear that I had warned her, even though I had. God was already punishing her enough. I told her that she should stop agonizing about how to tell Lynne, and just tell her already—it didn’t really matter how she did it; it wasn’t going to be pretty under any circumstances. For her anxiety, I suggested, she should try eating more plaice, haddock, and cod: they contained a lot of mood-stabilizing omega-3 oils.

  • • •

  On Sunday morning, Sally called to say she was going to the Çem-berlita s hamam for a steam bath and a massage. Would I like to join her? In the taxi, she told me that she and Dave had finished Loose Lips. “We had to fight each other for it at night. We really enjoyed it.”

  “How are the turtles?” I asked.

  She stopped smiling. “Dave’s building them a webcam.”

  A pudgy, cheerful girl of about eight gave us towels and slippers at the entrance to the bathhouse. Sally showed me the lockers. We undressed and wrapped the towels around our waists, then passed through a cool room to the vast marble caldarium, lit naturally by crescent- and moon-shaped windows carved into the dome of the cupola. “We just sit here for a bit first and work up a good sweat,” Sally explained, pointing to the heated octagonal slab of marble in the center of the steam room. We lay down on our towels, listening to the pleasant soft gabble of women’s voices, the sounds of fountains and sluicing water. Shafts of misty light pierced the steam.

  As we relaxed Sally asked me about Loose Lips. She wanted to know if I would write it differently now, after September 11. “The world’s so hard to laugh about now. Don’t you think?”

  The warmth was making me drowsy. I noticed that the heads of the marble columns supporting the arches of the dome were diamond-shaped, like baklava. Amid that expanse of marble, the world did not seem such a bad place, but that didn’t seem the thing to say, so I said something vague about it all being terrible, and yes, how serious it all seemed.

  “Exactly, the world seems so serious. When I took my job, I had no idea how serious my responsibilities would be. I thought I would be looking at people’s visa applications and asking myself, ‘Is this person going to try to work illegally in the United States?’ I never thought I’d be asking, ‘Is this person going to try to kill my family?’ ”

  “Do you ask yourself that every time you look at a visa application?”

  “Every single time.”

  What a lousy job, I thought. I was grateful that I didn’t have to make those decisions—and that I’d never have to shove the finger of some bloated corpse into a wedding ring. Sally adjusted her towel, then flipped onto her stomach. I did the same. “I keep thinking how I’d feel if it had been me who let Mohammed Atta into the country. You know, it’s scary, sometimes, just working at the consulate. When I took the job, my mom was so upset because the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had just been bombed. I told her, ‘Mom, you can’t spend your life worrying about random things like that.’ I used to ski, and I told her I was sure that way more people died in skiing accidents every year than in terrorist attacks. Now every time I walk through the front gates in the morning I think how easy it would be to drive a truck with a bomb through them. I think about all these things now—how easy it is to get the most God-awful weapons, how badly they want us dead.” A fat masseuse came over and gestured toward me. “Go ahead—you go first,” Sally said, gesturing toward the edge of the slab. “Take your locker key with you.”

  “No, you first.”

  “Okay, if you insist.” She slid over to the edge of the slab and lay facedown on the marble. The masseuse began pummeling her healthy pink Wisconsin flesh. I stayed where I was. Around the bathing area, cool cubicles with marble fountains were separated from the center by marble walls into which blossoms and Ottoman couplets had been carved. Round, dark-skinned women moved slowly from the marble slab to the fountains and back, pouring warm water over their soapy breasts and hips. A few minutes later, another masseuse came over, and I slid over to the edge of the slab. She scrubbed the dirt from my skin with a coarse cloth, then soaped me with bubbles squeezed from a billowing cheesecloth, then poured buckets of warm and cool water over my body, then massaged my back, then washed my hair. For a moment, time collapsed upon itself, and the women around me, Ottoman courtesans all, plotted their palace intrigues.

  After the bath, Sally and I retired to the cool room to lie on the cushioned divans and drink sweet tea. Relaxed and drowsy, I closed my eyes for a moment and thought about Arsalan. I imagined him unfastening the clasp of my necklace, his fingers brushing against the back of my neck.

  “It’s a different place these days,” Sally was saying. Her voice shook me out of my fantasy.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. I realized she’d been speaking for five minutes and I hadn’t heard a word. “Totally different,” I agreed again, not at all sure what I was agreeing to, but fairly sure it was the right thing to say.

  • • •

  Although it was already November, Istanbul was rosy, the air soft. The temperature was perfect for jeans and a sweater. I had settled into a rhythm. I worked in the mornings, then wandered out for lunch at one of the neighborhood restaurants, where cooks sliced juicy pieces of meat off turning spits, then slapped them on thick bread with chili peppers and tomatoes and pinches of powdered spices. Sally and I went running every other day. She always invited me for dinner afterwards. Dave sent me home with leftovers in Tupperware.

  Although Arsalan had said he would be away for at least a week, when ten days after his departure he still hadn’t returned—or at least, he hadn’t written—I was disappointed. However remote these villages were, surely one of them must have an Internet café? The news was full of stories about the rapid penetration of the Internet in Iran. It was apparently a threat to the authority of the regime. One article I read stressed that the Internet was exposing rural areas to outside influences to a previously unimaginable degree. Surely that meant that the Internet was accessible in rural areas, did it not?

  From: Samantha Allen allens@aol.com

  Date: November 20, 2003 01:15 AM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Re: (No subject)

  Of course it does. Sorry to tell you this, but a guy who wants to be in touch will find a way to be in touch, even if he has to train a carrier pigeon. If he hasn’t written, he’s just not that into you. You know all those women I was writing to before I met Lynne? I just can’t get rid of them. If I haven’t answered their e-mails in two weeks, you’d think they’d figure he’s just not that into me. But they keep forwarding me these dumb Internet jokes and sending me e-cards. With these awful spelling errors, too. It’s really a turnoff.

  I wasn’t sure she was right. Los Angeles was one thing, but Iran was another. I found myself studying news reports and blogs from Iran to better assess the penetration of the Internet into obscure Iranian villages. The news on these sites seemed oddly incongruous with the tone of Arsalan’s letters. It was hard to reconcile the urgent communiqués from the International Atomic Energy Agency with Arsalan’s melancholy Persia of Sufi poetry and Safavi
d miniatures. Iranian authorities were torturing prisoners of conscience, hanging dissidents, acquiring the materials to make nuclear weapons, and funding terrorists, but Arsalan’s world seemed entirely remote from any such concern. To judge from their weblogs, most educated Iranians looked out their windows and saw democracy protests. Arsalan saw peacocks: “A male and a female,” he had written to me the day before he left. “Perhaps they wandered over from the local bird sanctuary? Wollef was enthralled. We watched them for fifteen minutes or so, with Wollef chattering away. Then just as mysteriously as they arrived, they disappeared again. I wish you could have seen it.”

  He and I had exchanged letters about politics, but I never sensed that he found these issues passionately interesting, at least not in the way he found ruins and relics interesting. I thought I recognized his strain of political detachment; I had seen it before in my mother and in the musicians who came to play at her summer chamber music festival. My mother took an almost perverse pride in her indifference to current events. “Politicians come and go,” she had shrugged once when a friend asked her why she wasn’t watching the presidential debates. “They’re all the same. Music lasts forever.”

  Arsalan, it seemed to me, shared something of this attitude. Once I had asked him how he viewed President Khatami and the reform movement. “They’re all the same,” he had written back. “Persian art has depicted the same palace intrigues for the past two millennia. Here’s a nice example, by the way, from the Moghul era, commissioned by Emperor Akbar, circa 1551–53.” He had attached to his message a reproduction of a Rajasthani miniature, detailed as a Persian rug, depicting a gold-flecked city of refulgent rose and lapus lazuli, the roofs and edges of the buildings forming loops within ribbons within swirls. Guards with elongated Indian features dozed lazily in the parapets and turrets, oblivious to the enemy assassins climbing up the palace walls, knives in hand.

  I liked the picture so much that I made it into wallpaper on my computer. I was looking at it again over a breakfast of Dave’s homemade granola, wondering about the man who had sent it to me, when the phone rang. It was Dr. Mostarshed. It was Dr. Mostarshed again. Dr. Mostarshed was proving to be a first-class pest. At first he had written repeatedly because he couldn’t figure out my apartment. He couldn’t find the switch to the bathroom light; he didn’t know how to use the microwave; the key was stuck in the mailbox lock. I didn’t mind answering those messages. But then he called to say he’d left a notebook of critical bibliographical information on his bookshelf, and would I mind reading him the handwritten notes he’d made on page three, or perhaps it was page five? Over the past few days he had been calling over and over again, asking me to read passages from the various notebooks he’d forgotten. He was driving me nuts, especially since he could never remember which notebook held the information he needed or what page it was on.

  In fact, I was beginning to wonder what kind of man was inhabiting my charming little studio. There was a photograph on the wall of a nerdy Iranian man who I assumed was Dr. Mostarshed, shaking the hand of a nerdy official at some kind of nerdy award ceremony—the Nerd of the Year award, maybe, who knows; the banner behind the dais was written in some nerdy language I couldn’t understand. I’d assumed from his humorless expression, his apartment’s reserved interior decor, and Arsalan’s description of him that he would be a sober, responsible tenant. But when I looked through Dr. Mostarshed’s music collection, it gave me pause to ponder. It contained the most extensive collection of Bob Marley bootlegs I had ever seen. Then the owner of one of the neighborhood electric guitar stores stopped me in the street. He wanted to know whether Dr. Mostarshed would be going to the Rainbow Gathering this year. They were really hoping Doctor M. would make it again for the fire dance.

  Dr. Mostarshed wanted me to look for a folder in the drawer of his desk, in the study. “I apologize for disturbing you again,” he said to me in his heavily accented English. “I think the reference I need is in the margin notes on the fourth or fifth page of a yellow notepad in a file marked ‘Elmah Coins, Spring 2001.’ ” I opened the drawer and looked around. “By the way,” he said, “something a bit strange happened here a few nights ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “A man came by, quite late. He was singing outside your door. I opened the door and asked him to quiet down. He became rather belligerent. He said he knew you. He was quite drunk.”

  “I see.” I felt my stomach flip a bit. “Did this man by any chance have an Irish accent?”

  “He was hard to understand. I’m not good with accents in English, I’m afraid.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said you had his coat, and he wanted it back.”

  So Jimmy was still alive, I thought when I hung up. I wondered what he had really wanted. I noticed to my great surprise that I was curious, but not desperately curious. Jimmy seemed distant, both geographically and emotionally. Only a few months before, I would have spent a whole day trying to plumb the deeper meaning of Jimmy’s behavior. I would have written to Samantha—do you think those were love songs he was singing? I would have written to Imran—why can’t he admit that it’s not the coat he wants back? But oddly, I didn’t feel the need. Istanbul, I supposed, was a good place to recover from a broken heart. I was glad of this, but also slightly uneasy: I had been convinced, not that long ago, that my feelings about Jimmy were profound.

  I felt a bit embarrassed that Dr. Mostarshed had been disturbed, but I didn’t think of it again until, several days later, I found a message from someone named Mária Dehelán-Dörömbözi in my e-mail in-box. It took me a second to place the name; then I remembered. It was on the mailbox near mine on the Place Dauphine. The message must be from the elderly Hungarian woman who lived below my apartment. How had she found my address, I wondered? She hardly seemed the technically savvy type. In any event, she was irate. Her letter was written in a screedy eighteenth-century French. Apparently she’d had some kind of run-in with Dr. Mostarshed. He was, she said, disturbing la calme of the entire building. It was not just his loud music, day and night. Unsavory people, bad people, des louches, were coming and going at all hours! The Place Dauphine, she wrote, was not a cheap hotel!

  Wow, I thought. I guess I didn’t need to worry about Dr. Mostarshed being disturbed by Jimmy—he was probably already awake.

  The next part was the best. She had knocked on my door that morning to tell this disgraceful man that she had not slept one wink the previous night, thanks to his nocturnal escapades. She was, she had told him, exhausted. “You’re exhausted?” he had replied before slamming the door in her face. “Madame, imagine how we feel!”

  When I read this I nearly choked to death laughing. Then, when I thought about it, I began to get a little worried. It must have been pretty extreme, whatever he was doing in my apartment, to prompt her to go to the trouble of calling my landlord for my e-mail address and writing to me. I mean, the man was welcome to entertain whomever he wanted, but he was not welcome to get me evicted. And actually, he wasn’t welcome to entertain anyone he wanted. I had just replaced the carpet at my own expense. I did not want to come back and find cigarette burns in the rug because he’d been hosting coke-fueled échangiste parties.

  I made myself a cup of coffee while I considered the situation. I had been very careful with his apartment—I’d been watering his cactus faithfully, I had replaced a teacup that I’d broken with one just like it, and I had even scraped the pigeon shit off his balcony, which clearly no one had done for quite some years. It wasn’t really all that funny that he was treating my place like a cheap hotel.

  The phone rang. “Yes,” I said, in a flat, unfriendly tone, preparing to tell Dr. Mostarshed that primo, I was not his secretary, and segundo, I had better come back to find my carpet immaculate.

  “Hello,” replied a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. “Is this Claire?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Arsalan.”

  • • •

&
nbsp; “I wanted to make sure you were well,” he said.

  I didn’t answer for a moment. I was too taken aback—not that he had called, but by his accent, which was not at all what I had expected it to be. I had expected him to have a Persian accent, or perhaps an English accent characteristic of the London neighborhood in which he had grown up. But it was neither English nor Persian. It was impossible to place. It was elegant and formal, almost queerly so. His consonants were crisper than any native speaker’s, and he pronounced each word with great precision, as if he had studied English from a computer—or perhaps from a Martian.

  It had never occurred to me that we could call each other. Iran somehow seemed like one of those places that was too far away to call. But of course he could just pick up the phone and call. He had Dr. Mostarshed’s phone number; why shouldn’t he have used it?

  “I’m fine,” I said at last. “When I picked up the phone, I thought you were Dr. Mostarshed. He’s been calling and calling.”For a moment, we were both silent, waiting for the other to speak, and then we both spoke at once.

  “You first,” we both said at the same time. He waited a moment and I spoke: “How was your trip?”

  “I’m not back yet. I’m in Sistan-Baluchistan, near the Afghan border.” The connection was absolutely clear, as if he were next door. His voice was deep. It was resonant and rough-edged from years of smoking Caspian tobacco. “I’m calling you from a satellite phone. It belongs to a doctor at the Afghan refugee camp. There are no regular phones here. I should speak only for a few minutes, since it isn’t my phone.”

  That, I supposed, answered my question about why he hadn’t stopped in an Internet café to drop me a note.

  For a second, an absurd thought occurred to me. I was so in the habit of making mental notes of my daily experiences to recount to Arsalan that I imagined writing to Arsalan to tell him that Arsalan had called, and that Arsalan had sounded very different from the way I had thought he would. Two Arsalans existed in my mind simultaneously—Arsalan, my imaginary best friend, and Arsalan, this curious man with a Martian accent who was for some reason calling me and talking to me as if he knew me.