Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Ought to get rid of that German stuff,” Wert said. “Can’t do you that much good at the UN.” Or not with us.

  “Father says the same.”

  “What’s your post there?”

  “Oh, quite insignificant. I am what you call—underfoot. To learn.”

  Which might mean either that the clan hadn’t been able to buy him in—or that he was being groomed for the top.

  “Vielleicht—what is the English for that, Mr. Wert?”

  “‘Perhaps.’”

  “Pairhops. No. Purr…haps. R-right.” The son was making a steeple of his fingers as children did, with the thumbs serving as portcullis, or door. Opening these slowly, he looked in, spellbound. “Purr-haps it was your last letter from my father, Mr. Beel?” He closed the thumb-doors, crushing the steeple to fists. “It was my last phone call.” He brushed his eyes. On the single-breasted jacket that bound him so perfectly, a button popped.

  “Why didn’t he ever come over here?” Wert burst out angrily. “He went everywhere else.”

  “He never tell you?”

  “No.”

  “That it was because of me?”

  “No. But I suspected it.”

  “Something bad, you thought.”

  Wert couldn’t answer. His eyes stung. So for Bakhtiary Senior, no more of that tumbling exchange-bazaar of ideas—stopped now at the pen, stopped at the throat. Yet stipulating roses all the way, in the senses left to him. Wert remembered planning, years back, how he would take Bakhtiary south, to Athens, Georgia; they’d have understood him there.

  “Nothing bad, Beel. I assure.” The boy’s eyes shone their improbable color. Devotion, in a blue mosque. “I will ask when I see him. If I can tell you. If I can speak for him.”

  Wert put his face between his hands, smoothing it, blew his nose. “Sorry. I get these irrational angers, these days. All my emotions seem to turn into them.”

  “And you are only forty-six.”

  “He did tell you everything.” Wert put out his hand, was able to smile. “Can I help?”

  “But you have help already. Wirklich. Only because of my mission to you—am I allowed home.”

  “Mission? Thought you were just passing through.”

  “I see at once you will be too angry. When you walk in.”

  So this vague, rancid choler he couldn’t shake must be plain to all—in his gait, his gesture, probably even the flushings of his skin. Like those men clowned by drink, whose veined noses marked them. “What is it? Your—mission.”

  In his mind he was already telling Nosworthy. One of those little corruptions, would it be? They had no sense of the level of these to Western eyes, since standards were simply not the same. As the old man had smilingly pointed out to Wert early, moral standards on both sides were impossibly high—but in reverse.

  Would Wert be asked to use his “influence” precisely in some area where he couldn’t imaginably either have it or exert it? Like getting a failed candidate for Oxford by hook or crook past the examiners, and in? Or persuading the Victoria & Albert to part with a piece of the national treasure—at a fine price of course—to some avid tycoon in Teheran? Where the university itself would have done the Bakhtiarys any favor, and maybe the museum, too. It wouldn’t be anything military; that drama had long since been transferred to the corporations, in the open style learned from the West. No, it would be some amusingly human exchange, which, for the Bakhtiarys not to perform for the cousin or uncle who craved it would be a breach of the highest family faith. Or it could be a favor for friends—in which case the fealty required soared altogether out of sight. Wert wouldn’t be asked anything directly connected with his job. Nothing small, that is.

  “I have two missions,” Manoucher said. “One—to get a sweater set, size forty-eight, for my mother, at Harrods.” He snapped his fingers, grinning. “Accomplished.”

  “Yes, the pound may be down momentarily, now and then. But thanks to cashmere, never quite out. What’s the other?”

  Young Bakhtiary pressed his hands to his vest, looking up. It was an English vest—and ceiling—but Wert fancied that behind the vest’s wearer he could see the sky in Meshed and smell the sulfur tinge of those winter afternoons when some celestial vegetable seemed to be comfortably burning, while a luminous-eyed young crony, backing himself up against the wall of Wert’s study, recited stanzas nominally addressed to the Five Gates or the Tortoise River, but just barely grazing these loci of history with personal allusion, and choked up halfway through with fervor and embarrassment. Waiting for persuasion by all hands to help him through; which was ritual. After which everybody glowed with tea, and went out into the dusk convinced of human glory, and his own part in it.

  It had been a marvelous way to spend an afternoon. Only the grudging would see it as one more of those late-marrying young males’ substitutes for sex.

  These days Wert himself couldn’t persuade a flea of anything; he was tired of any of that, dejuiced of all early generosities, or ardors, and resigned to his own sex substitutes of the moment—a late-melting pub-love now and then, or more recently, a brisk smartener with a woman barrister who’d had her wrenchings also. By now he knew that a life spent in “tours”—the departmental phrase—had a way of putting the most colorful present into the past, almost as one experienced it.

  Meanwhile, a single man whose general job classification—Cultural Attaché—might often mean exactly the opposite, could take compensation in a tinselly string of telephone numbers circling the globe, and often brightly renewable, especially on leaves home—since by now his sophistication on other countries was endless, and his own people, tired of innocence, were well ready for it.

  But how tired he must be, to sink with such gratitude into these cushiony Middle-Eastern pauses, where there were stanzas of time between thoughts. As in the days after Jenny’s death.

  “Mr. Beel?”

  He sat at attention. Importances often strung themselves along a man’s life in the same recurring style, often with the same people.

  “My father ask you tell me the history of that day. Of your meeting,” he said, as if coached.

  “The day at the Danieli.”

  “Please?”

  “Name of the hotel.”

  “Pardon. We were in maybe twenty hotels that year.”

  “Um…Excuse me—I do this for you?”

  Manoucher thought, gravely. They had postures for it. “Us.”

  “My word.” Wert always swore in the manner of the country he was in, a habit he disliked but couldn’t shake. Blame it on a tenderness toward the foibles of far places and peoples, which gripped him the minute he stepped over their borders, making the host people his always excusable darlings and him their surefooted interpreter. When young this had made him briefly valuable at his job; now there was danger of its tabbying him; in his line, the men who went to the top were not the sensitives. Already this talent for observation may have cost him his nativity. For when he went home on leave (where if confronted as now he should be saying “Bro-ther” or “Kee-rist”) that other stance persisted. He was always faintly explaining Americans over his shoulder to a savage interlocutor who could only be himself and who gave them no quarter—tenderness to the foreigner not being involved.

  “Let me see—” He meant to exhaust all his own pauses. Meanwhile running over the possibilities. Could the dying Bakhtiary, reading late into the night, next to a bowl of roses as was his wont, have become convinced of a heaven of confessive therapy for all? Nonsense. They never even pushed Islam, except politically. To them, all the other garden-of-Allah Islam doctrine was already consonant with the existent world. Or else the rest of the world wasn’t worth the conversion. Or not to Bakhtiarys.

  No, it would be something practical, within the terms of what friends do for one another; the old man always insisted that Wert had done a lot. Could it be that after all these years they still thought that Wert had some actionable claim—against the city of Venice and i
ts non-pavings? Or the Lambretta cycle company, for making what it did? A couple of the older men in the Bakhtiary household in Venice had had an even odder expectation—that the State Department would surely compensate Wert for the loss of his wife, either by finding him another or furnishing him the wherewithal for a richer one. These two had even argued which alternative would be the fairer, while the head of the household, who knew that Wert by now understood almost everything in that language, watched him.

  Old Bakhtiary had had one of those countenances made powerful by skin-disease surmounted; the pocked skin had stretched all-of-a-piece over the heavy features, a fine hide, worsting time even in the ceremonial picture sent Wert two years ago, when the old man had had a medal for state services unannounced. In the dim Italian voltage, the beard under the shaven cheeks shone dark green. Whether or not from his lack of skin mobility, Bakhtiary had only one facial expression—a dignified alertness to advantage, so steadily held to that one never had any clue as to his immediate acts. But as to his approving any long-gone claims—again nonsense. All the man’s actions were immediate—though performed with an air of ageless calm.

  The waiter was asking whether Wert and Manoucher wanted coffee in the lounge. Beyond, the maîtresse watched him and Manoucher with a care not all duty; yes, she was Wert’s type, competently neat and with a businesslike sensuality, probably clever enough beyond her station to be companionable, maybe arrested by class difference but not crushed by it. Not at all likely to be one of the poignant ones Wert couldn’t take.

  “Tea,” Manoucher said. “I’ll have tea.”

  “A sweet? The trifle is good here.” Wert was recalling those Venetian pastry wallows in which the male and female halves of the Iranian household had most nearly converged. The men, arriving one by one or in pairs, had indulged themselves patriarchically, as if they were doing this for the home, as perhaps they were. Clustering at the samovar, lacy tidbits in hand, they looked the more virile for it. The same physical heightening occurred when they leaned intensely over flowers, sometimes over a single bloom, or swarmed almost scholastically to examine a fresh bunch of freesias or iris. Extending into what in other countries might be the woman’s sphere, and often in the most delicate attitude, their blunt masculinity seemed only to increase, even to its own scent, in a way that assailed Wert, abashed him and could never have been explained at home.

  Giggles would come meanwhile from the women, eating too, behind a screen which the hotel had supplied. A sense of their family life exuded through its wooden lattices—of deferential girls, black-eyed swans barely out of the nursery, waiting to enter some other harem of family women whether they were to be the one wife or not; the older women were the go-betweens. In Bakhtiary’s house in Teheran the women’s quarters had still been separate; even in the relaxed hotel version Wert had seen how the day consumed itself for both sides in dozens of rumorous back-and-forth domestic transactions, beneath which the sexual, a blank to outsiders, must be explicit to all. Courtship, even for those of his young cronies in Tabriz and Meshed who’d been at university, and for the girls, just beginning to attend, whom Wert had glimpsed there, unveiled by then but black-dressed, off by themselves and still giggling—had been a matter of channels running separate. The groom of an arranged but delayed marriage occupied the engagement period in elaborate romanticizing to his devoted male friend. The girl would be always with women, presumably taking in whatever midwifery and suggestive passion she could over pistachio-sprinkled macaroons—being urged to more whipped cream and filliped toward a man all in one. When girl and man finally met and coupled in the hot, honey cake dark supplied them, did they speak?

  Manoucher, hesitating, was feeling his girth. He, too, saw the maîtresse, and lowered his eyes. “No thank you, no dessert. Three months, and I am already getting the marriage-fat.”

  “Your father won’t approve of that.”

  “I have to send pictures, every month.”

  Wert laughed. Everybody in Teheran knew the story of Manoucher’s mother and father. Old Bakhtiary, having left his country as a young man “to see the world,” had lingered mainly in Paris and other chic corners of France, until he was sixty and assumably well seasoned, when as he himself said, he had returned home “To found a family.” In the year after the heir was born, when both parents had grown connubially fat, he proposed to his wife that they take a thinning cure at one of the spas known to him during his long golden youth. She, strong-willed as he, had to his surprise refused either to leave home for foreign uncertainties which might unseat her, or to grow thin—which both he and she apparently equated with modernity and the West. He had forced her to Switzerland anyway. It was rumored that she had then done the unheard-of—refused marital relations. The old uncles of the traveling household, however, blamed her later infertility—for which Bakhtiary had dispossessed her, on her weight. In any case she’d had no more children. The second wife, the old men had said contemptuously, was thin enough—from having only girls.

  It couldn’t matter much with the third wife—not for long.

  “Your father has the best of both worlds. Actually he doesn’t give a damn about ours; he’s always mocking it.” How much laughter there had always been around him. In his company, the younger Wert had felt pugnaciously in command of life and its golden days—with a good swathe of both still in prospect. Even now, whenever one of the letters came Wert saved an evening, dining alone over it in the black-and-silver Kensington flat he’d subleased from a transferred colleague who’d had a fancy wife. “Decoration by Heals,” the lease agreement said. “Not to be tampered with.” A while back Wert, moved to satisfy the old man’s charmingly voracious interest in the lives of others—or in Wert’s life—had sent him a picture of the sitting room’s coffin-slim couches and starved, sculptural drapes. The following Christmas he’d been sent an enormous domed-brass brazier, centered in a multicolored circular comforter thick as eiderdown, under which an entire peasant family could lie old-style, feet pointed toward the coals. Since when it lay vivaciously on his black-cat floor and conveniently took the eye of any woman he brought home.

  “Not you, Mr. Beel; he never mock you.” Again the scrutiny, so strong it raised the nap on him.

  In the lounge, Manoucher parted his mustachios over the tea. Just so tea had been drunk in Meshed, the young cronies in their badly cut blazers, bending in obeisance to the ark of friendship as if an invisible imam had given the signal, their intense eyes brimming over the cup at Wert, the host, at each other, in adoration of the situation of kinship, focused on the samovar whose cobalt flame they could carry anywhere. Sons-of-generals working as Embassy clerks, shy teachers who’d never before rubbed elbows with those except through this foreign host of theirs, and that one young poet to whom all deferred—Wert could never have explained to them how frail friendship was in America. In the red-velvet night clubs of Teheran at the time they could have seen the U.S. version of it in the executives and technicians of the Point Four program boozing over the caviar—a backslapping, sometime thing. Wert had later brought his samovar out with him along the roundabout route he had traveled home, scooping up the last sights of a country in which, still a tyro, he’d thought he might have left behind a life.

  Rocking with him in the plane over the Elburz range, cradled on a bus seat along the Caspian and flying again over the desert-bordering bazaar cities in one of whose crucibles it maybe had been made, this bronze, crenellated pot with charcoal crumbs still in its belly, such an elaboration for boiling water merely, and indeed falsely stamped with the Russian imperial crest as so many were, seemed to him a concept he was bringing out with him, although when finally disposing of Jenny’s effects he’d sent the thing itself to Jenny’s parents in Illinois. By that time, Bakhtiary’s letters had begun, and he’d had no further need of it.

  His coffee cup clicked against his teeth. I know what I am to this boy-man of theirs, this possible tiger engrossed in training himself up from cubship. I’m a bequest.
Or I’m going to be. It’s been decreed. I’m to be young Manoucher’s old friend.

  “What can I tell you?” he said, leaning forward. “Our story? It wasn’t much.” In Manouch’s hard blue gaze and just perceptible headshake he saw that it was. Or it flowered there, as he himself spoke. “We met in Manila, Jenny and I, my second tour. My first, as you know, had been in Iran—Tabriz, Meshed. In Manila, she was working for the Filipino professor who was our Fulbright Commission liaison.” An idealistic girl from Antioch, she had hobnobbed with the young Filipino intellectuals who published The Literary Apprentice, teaching them Martha Graham rhythmics on the side and tangling too ardently with their anti-American politics.

  “She was helping picket the American Embassy when I met her. A sailor of ours who’d killed a Filipino national had been sent home for trial, instead of being tried there.”

  The Roe case—in the light of the Marcos regime, what ancient history it was. It had been a period when all Southeastern Asia was hung with the lanterns of exchange scholarship, as if it was nothing but a ruddy international tea garden—and Vietnam had been only one more place.

  “Maybe she married me just in time.” Dressed in one of their Maria Clara blouses, a high-shouldered embroidered trifle which he’d ultimately sent home, too. “We were married at the Embassy.” With a wedding lunch at the Overseas Press Club where, as Jenny had written her mother, they’d had custard-apple ice cream, and a group of dancers had done a dance of stepping over bamboo poles, called the tini-kling. “Venice, where I was sent shortly, was really our honeymoon.” Living at the Danieli with other departmental couples in an expense-paid suite whose governmental arrangements dated from World War II, they had been part of an almost communal life which might well have seemed normal to that other Iranian household in the hotel.