I told him that I was doing just fine and studying Turkish. I tried out a few Turkish pleasantries, to which he replied in kind. His Turkish sounded absolutely fluent, which only added to my disorientation—the mind has a fierce need to categorize people by their language and accent, and his linguistic shape shifting wasn’t making things easier.
I asked him to tell me more about his trip. It had been a success so far, he thought, though exhausting: Sistan-Baluchistan was the most impenetrable—and the strangest—region of Iran. It was a notorious corridor for drug smuggling; undeveloped, drought-stricken, desolate, and poor; populated by pastoral nomads who spoke a ghastly dialect of primitive Persian. He and his two colleagues had trekked nearly two hundred fifty kilometers, first passing overland on a dusty plateau, then taking a boat through a network of lakes. They had stopped in several dozen villages, spreading the word about the importance of preserving the villagers’ heritage.
They had planned to begin their return two days ago, but a vicious dust storm had swept over the region, making travel impossible. They were stuck now in the middle of nowhere, keeping company with six hundred dysentery-riddled Afghan refugees, two physicians from Médicins sans Frontières, and a trigger-happy unit of the Imam Ali battalion of the Revolutionary Guards, who had come to settle a score with an elusive Baluchi tribesman. “I thought I should get in touch with you,” said Arsalan, “since I know you’re alone there. I wanted to make sure you weren’t having any difficulties.”
See, Samantha? There was a perfectly logical explanation for his silence. Why, he’d just been caught in a raging dust storm in an Afghan refugee camp in Sistan-Baluchistan! How many women throughout history, I wondered, sitting and waiting by a phone that never rings, had hoped that was the problem?
As he spoke, I tried to perform an internal simultaneous translation: I tried to imagine reading the words he was saying, to see if they sounded like him. The effort made it hard to focus, and I realized he had abruptly changed the subject. “I knew they were native to the region,” he was saying, “but I never expected to encounter one.”
“You saw what? Where?”
“Right here. A bit higher up in the mountains. But it shouldn’t have been here at all—the drought has killed everything here, except for a few scorpions. I have no idea what she was doing here. Looking for food, perhaps?”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I’ve never seen one before, not even in a zoo. She had massive paws and yellow eyes, and the most intelligent, thoughtful face. I looked at her and she looked at me—at least I think she was a she. We were both absolutely still, just looking at each other. And then—I don’t know why, it just seemed like the right thing to say—I said, Hi, kitty. Very softly. Just like I say to Wollef when he comes over to say hello in the mornings.”
Arsalan repeated the words he had said to the animal, and oddly, he said them with a different accent—he pronounced the words tenderly, with a Persian inflection. Hi, kitty. He said it almost the way I would have imagined him saying it, with a low, hypnotic gentleness. “Were you frightened?” I asked.
“We were both surprised, but neither of us was frightened. I don’t know why I wasn’t. They’re dangerous, very dangerous, and there’s nothing to eat up here. She must have been hungry. But I was so mesmerized that it didn’t occur to me to be frightened.”
“What happened next?”
“I said it again . . . Hi, kitty. Hi, pussycat. She flicked her tail and made a rasping noise—huggg, huggg, huggg, huggg. Then she sniffed the air—just like Wollef does—and I suppose she decided I didn’t smell like something good to eat. She cocked her head to the side and she said something important—huggg, huggg, huggg—but I couldn’t understand it. I thought she looked discouraged by my response, or lack of it. As if she found me disappointingly limited. At last she shrugged, or at least I believe that’s what she was doing, and then very slowly, very casually, she turned around and softly padded away.”
He might have not have the accent I expected, I thought, but whoever this man was, he wasn’t boring.
• • •
I heard from Arsalan next when he wrote to me two days later from Zabol, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan. The dust storm had made a long overland journey impossible, so he was waiting to catch a plane back to Isfahan. The flight left only twice a week. He had just missed the last one. There were plenty of Internet cafés in Zabol and nothing to do but use them. “This city,” he wrote, “is known for its processed foods, livestock feed, processed hides, milled rice, bricks, reed mats, and baskets. Occasionally a bomb goes off. I’m so bored here that I’m vaguely hoping for that.”
I was stuck in front of my computer as well. The reader may have noticed that I had not spent much time in Istanbul working on my book. Unfortunately, so had my editor. Hours after Arsalan’s phone call, he had sent me a terse, terrifying note: “Claire. Checking to make sure we’re on schedule for timely delivery. yrs, B.”
I had been working on the same chapter since my arrival. Stricken with anxiety and guilt, I resolved to remain at my desk until finishing it or death, whichever came first. By the time Arsalan’s first message from Zabol arrived, I had been sitting dutifully before my computer for seven hours, writing and erasing the same paragraph over and over and checking my word count every ten minutes. Each time, to my dismay, the number seemed to decline.
The arrival of my editor’s note had prevented me from dwelling at great length upon the significance of Arsalan’s call, although I had, of course, dropped a note to Samantha about it.
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 01:15 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Eek! He called!
I take it back. He’s way into you. He must have missed you a lot if he called all the way from there.
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 01:30 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Eek! He called!
Well, he probably just wanted to know if I was okay.
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 01:45 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Eek! He called!
Of course you’re okay. You’re in civilization. He’s the one in wherever-the-fuckistan. Anyway, don’t worry about his weird accent. That’s a superficial thing to get hung up on. Like gender. Look, you can’t tell much from someone’s voice. I think we reveal ourselves more completely in letters. Especially since so many people are born into the wrong bodies; you know what I mean? If you’d spoken to me on the phone before meeting me, you would have assumed I was a man. Most people do. But I think you know me—the real me—quite well. Better than many people who have met me in person. I mean, Lynne just sent me a bottle of aftershave, for God’s sake.
She was right, I thought. Some people are born into the wrong bodies; that’s for sure. I thought of my brother’s closest friend in high school, Pearl Wu. Her face and figure told the world she was a diligent engineering student—the kind of girl who would make good grades, go to an excellent university, then marry another hardworking dullard, perhaps an equally earnest dentist. But her face and figure were quite mistaken. That girl with the nondescript features of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda poster was meant by destiny to wear a tight-bodiced crimson dress with stiletto heels and enormous gold hoop earrings; she was meant to hold a single red rose between her teeth; her real eyes were black like coal and flashed like lightning; her real calling was not engineering but the lambada. When her guidance counselor proposed that she study advanced math and physics, she told him she had other plans, muchacho, and repaired to the city’s grittiest Hispanic nightclubs, squandering her youth on salsa, sangria, and the secret hope that jealous men would call her Chiquita and grab her ass as if there was something there to g
rab. When she was a sophomore at UC Davis, my brother had told me, Pearl encountered some pistol pocket from Guadalajara in a chat room on the Internet. After corresponding with him for three weeks, she told the world she was in love, dropped her classes, quit her job at Jamba Juice, and flew down to Mexico to spend the winter in his arms. I wonder what he thought when he met her in the flesh?
Whatever my reservations and whatever the truth, between Arsalan’s boredom and my unfinished chapter it was easy to pick up our correspondence right where we left it. Despite the odd sensation I’d felt speaking to him on the phone, I found it just as natural to chat with him by e-mail as before, so much so that I told him how surprised I’d been by his accent.
From: Arsalan [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 03:16 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Burnt City
Yes, and I had imagined you with a French accent.
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 03:20 PM
To: Arsalan [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Burnt City
A what? Where did you get that idea? Why would I have a French accent? I’m American.
From: Arsalan [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 03:26 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Burnt City
I don’t quite know. You live in Frnce, I suppose. I pologize for my spelling. This keybord is covered in dust, nd the first letter of the lphbet is so filthy tht it is sticking. This whole miserble city is covered in dust. I have just been served stew of sheep ft and dust. I’m covered in dust. I cn’t wsh it off becuse the wter here is rtioned.
Moreover—ah, banging sharply on the keyboard seems to fix things!—I have just received an e-mail from my colleague, the director of a team of archaeologists working near the Burnt City. The team arrived at the site yesterday only to discover that smugglers had looted seven graves. Each grave contained twenty to eighty artifacts. I can safely say there are no comparable artifacts anywhere in the world. This trip has been a complete waste of time. It’s simply not enough for a few hapless archaeologists to traipse from village to village speaking slowly to these thieving rural idiots. We need armed guards at the site, day and night. But the officials haven’t implemented a single security measure, damn them.
I was—perhaps a bit naively—puzzled to hear this. Several nights before, I’d picked up a book from Dr. Mostarshed’s bookshelf and had been reading it since with great interest. It was a study of Shi‘a Islam and the intellectual origins of the Iranian Revolution called The Mantle of the Prophet, written by a professor of medieval Eastern history at Harvard. I was struck by the author’s account of the ordinary Persian’s sense of history. It seemed, from the way he described it, that Iranians viewed the ancient past as something fully relevant to their daily lives, a source of passionate pride and burning grievances. The Shah repeatedly likened himself to Cyrus the Great, commissioning lavish banquets to celebrate himself as his heir—which is, when you think about it, quite strange; it is hard to imagine Jacques Chirac, for example, positioning himself in an election campaign as the sacred heir of Vercingetorix.
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 03:44 PM
To: Arsalan [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Burnt City
But Persians are known for treasuring their past, aren’t they? I would have thought protecting the nation’s archaeological heritage would figure prominently in the government’s priorities.
From: Arsalan [email protected]
Date: November 22, 2003 03:56 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Burnt City
You would think so. But you would be dead wrong. Not only do they do nothing to protect it; they’re actively destroying it: building proud, stupid dams across the country that will cause untold damage to thousands of priceless sites. We will never even know what will be submerged. Thousands of reliefs, graves, ancient caves, and other remains from the Elamite era are already underwater. The dams threaten the remains of Pasargadae, the capital of ancient Persia. Cyrus the Great’s mausoleum is at risk. It survived looting by Alexander and wave after wave of invaders who descended upon Persia from the shores of the Caspian, from Central Asia, from Arabia. Innumerable wars were fought, towns fell, their inhabitants massacred, and yet the ruins remained. Its excavation, in the 1930s, was one of the great triumphs of modern archaeology. And now it faces burial under mud. It sickens me and robs me of my sleep.
I was sorry to hear about it—it surprised me, in fact, how much it disturbed me, although I’m not sure whether it was because of my own sentimentality about the ruins or because I felt so sorry for Arsalan, who reminded me of a man helplessly watching a member of his family drown. It seemed to me a grievous crime, in any event. Archaeological ruins are like the giant pandas; they are particularly poignant when endangered. It’s terrible to think that once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, and no amount of regret will bring them back. I had been outraged by the Taliban’s destruction of the Great Buddhas. So had Arsalan. “I had never seen those Buddhas,” he wrote. “And now I never will.”
I did not hear from him again for the rest of the day, nor the day after. But on the following morning, there was a message waiting for me when I opened my e-mail.
From: Arsalan [email protected]
Date: November 24, 2003 07:56 AM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: The Veil
Dear Claire,
I know your time in Istanbul is coming to a close. I have returned to Isfahan, and have found, waiting for me, an invitation to the UNESCO conference in Paris next month. I would not ordinarily go to such a thing, but if you would only beckon me to come, I shall accept.
When shall it come to pass, ah when,
That suddenly, beyond our ken,
We shall succeed to rend this veil
That hath our whole affair conceal?
I await your word.
Arsalan
• • •
I reread the poem. I wondered if he realized that were the veil to be rent at that moment, he would see me with dirty hair, sleep-swollen eyes, and a red splotch on my cheek where my pillow had been. When he imagined me, did he see me as I was now, wearing an old stained Appalachian State University Athletics sweatshirt my mother had found at a thrift store, my toenail polish flaking off, surrounded by unwashed dishes I’d been too lazy to carry to the sink?
I did not answer right away.
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: November 24, 2003 04:15 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: He wants to visit!
I hate to be the killjoy here, but isn’t it a bit odd that he’s sending you romantic poetry even though he’s never even met you? Have you considered the possibility that he’s a desperate weirdo?
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: November 24, 2003 04:19 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: He wants to visit!
No, I think that’s totally natural in Iran.
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: November 24, 2003 04:27 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: He wants to visit!
Exactly my point.
She could be right, I thought. I was more concerned that we simply wouldn’t care for each other in the flesh. Or that we would. I thought of Jimmy’s lavish declarations of eternal devotion, the way his eyes had moistened with briny Irish tears when we first kissed, how he’d sworn that he would lay down his life for me, Och aye, he would.
I sent a reply to Samantha promising her that I would think it over ca
refully, but several seconds later, the new mail icon swished up. Message undeliverable. Recipient’s mailbox is full. I sent it again and received the same rejection. How very annoying. I was sure she didn’t realize it. Lynne had probably sent her another two dozen high-resolution photographs of her dogs, Casper and Weinberger, chasing the Frisbee on the beach.
Samantha had sent me her phone number once when I was distraught about Jimmy; she had told me to call if ever I needed to talk. I hadn’t used it—I don’t really like talking on the phone. I scrolled through my old messages, found it, then dialed. A man picked up. “May I speak to—” I began, then realized it was a machine.
“This is Samantha Bryant,” said the recording. Holy shit, I thought. She really does sound like a man. I don’t know why that surprised me; she had said so repeatedly, but it did, completely. I knew she screened her calls. If I spoke, she would probably pick up. But I was suddenly shy about speaking to her; I didn’t want to discuss this with some man I barely knew. I hung up without leaving a message.
The sun was setting. Imran would be home soon. I sent him a note. What did he make of Arsalan’s suggestion? I asked. I made myself some tea, then sat quietly with my thoughts, looking out the window as the evening light illuminated the Golden Horn. Despite myself, I felt a reservoir of suppressed emotion begin to overflow. I hadn’t realized how much dormant yearning I had in me.
I finished my tea, then busied myself. I tidied, brushed my teeth, washed my face. Imran replied punctually.
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