Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  They hear steps, voices, women’s. No giggles.

  “I will tell you something.” From his breath, the old man chews coriander. “You will not believe. Manoucher…Soraya, his wife, has not yet sleep with him.”

  The door opens inward to what he first mistakes for a flood of sunshine. Concealed lighting is shafting from all corners, spotted from niches and cornices, or bent in strips. Tinted glass, installed over what must be front windows, is lit from between. Because the ceiling is low, the effect is of a chapel cut in half with the top part missing, people below appearing stubbed. The girl of Manoucher’s picture is before him. Awaits him. That’s the stance. She’s all in black—that loose “granny” dress almost to the ankles, with black stockings and sandals, too, which girls on the barricades of anything wear these days, or girls who follow that style; she could be at a “demo” in Boston, ready to demonstrate for the environment, or at an incendiary poetry reading in a Chelsea bar. No makeup, of course. That almost accusatory pallor the political ones seem to get. Some of those types wear handcraft decoration: she lacks even a wedding ring. The neck is goose-long, the brows meet over the nose—in the picture these must after all have been plucked, but she’s still handsome, in an offended way. Doesn’t she speak English? On the phone, hadn’t she?

  “Manoucher asked me to come.”

  She bows. Clearly she understands, but they’re ushered further in, seated and offered the ritual bowl of nuts, without a speech. A bowl of pumpkin seeds as well. She’s affecting the mode of the lower classes then? He realizes he’s very angry—it must be for Manoucher. Taking a handful of seeds, he cracks one, spitting the husk into his palm. His tongue remembers its old agility. She’s going over him top to toe, darting intelligences to herself. He cracks and splits.

  “Will you have bourbon?” Fereydoun asks anxiously. “She has it.”

  He bows a stiff no. She’s achieved a kind of personal chador, he’s thinking. She’d doctrinairely unveiled. All over the world they do it, not just Iran, or South America, or here. His friend in Japan has a black-stocking wife like this one, tall too in the new-generation way, and by God with the same neck. The censorious way they all dress even has a kind of nineteenth-century force and battling charm. George Sand, Isadora Duncan, come to mind. Poor Manoucher. He spits a husk.

  “Will you speak French? She knows American, but doesn’t want to speak it.” Fereydoun already has the harried air of a go-between trying to pour balm. “She wants me to tell you at once, though, that Bakh has allowed them to read your exchange of letters. She and her aunt. While they were in prison. Her aunt much admires them. And you.”

  Oh he did, did he? And didn’t she admire them? But it’s Bakh he’s angry at. Friendship is to be used, he himself is no coolly off-hand Northerner. But these people never know where intensity should fall short. He’s never been in prison, of course. “Why won’t she speak it?” And who then was the rich-voiced girl on the telephone?

  Ferey hesitates. Gets her nodded cue. “She has taken a vow. Until—” He gets a shake of her head. “A vow.”

  Insufferable. Wert gets up. “Full of vows, isn’t she.” She turns pink, a little. Now his choler’s been released he can feel sorry. Poor things, they’ve always had to use their body-wiles. Even in the act of freeing themselves, they hang onto the method.

  He wanders over to a row of black boxes and instrument panels which interest him, a whole row of ebony gadgetry set underneath the stained-glass windows. On the window seat, which runs the perimeter of the room as in old-fashioned rooms he’s seen in Iran, there’s a red catalogue, open face down. Hammacher Schlemmer’s Instant Phone Order Gift Catalogue. Fascinated, he tracks what must be her purchases, none yet installed. Among them he notes a Spilhaus Space Clock “showing sun and moon positions, constellations, high tide and low, moonrise and set, Mean Solar Time and ordinary”; beyond it something called Marketline—“place your phone on terminal and get 7,000 stocks and options only 15 min. behind the tape”; a conference telephone amplifier; an automatic paper-shredder; and a cordless electric telephone index “accommodating one hundred and seventy names”—on which are inscribed two. He’s aghast at what his country can provide a foreigner ardent for mechanization. But already mounted on the wall is something simpler, a Song Bird thermometer, a silly eighteen-inch disc with huge numbers and “birds in natural colors,” which jolts his sympathies. It may be made in Western Germany and sold here, but those reds and blues and birds were once Persian taste.

  “She didn’t want to leave,” Fereydoun is breathing behind him. “But it is only on this condition Bakh gets her out. And she is good girl—she makes modern home for Manoucher. Please come back to chair.”

  “Very modern.” The doodled Farsi script on the telephone pad is familiar, but he hasn’t time to place it. In his ear a whisper: “Manouch—she is really soft for him. Since before he is here. But she has pride, she wanted not to get out of prison like this. Also—there is Madame. Who wish them to live in Switzerland.”

  “Madame knows all this?”

  “With us, what one woman does not know, the others tell her.”

  Never seeing when it’s time to give up gossip and stand together? At times he fancies that women in search of autonomy need a male coordinator.

  This is a big room, obviously made of several small ones. Can she hear them across it? She’s sitting like Whistler’s mother, in her younger black. Such a yackety sort her people are when together, yet he’s often seen one of them apart like this, sitting in silence as if in extra air. She’s watching them. Growing strong under their audience? A harem-habit, he thinks. Will it make for more tenacious female revolutionaries than we have in the West?

  “She really won’t speak English then?”

  Ferey throws up his hands. “She has Ph.D. in it. In speech. And I must shop all over New York with her as interpreter. She say Fateh is not the right modern for her. Except at the drugstore.”

  Wert can’t help laughing. “She’s right.”

  Suddenly she whirls round at Fereydoun. “Tell him.” In Farsi. A flood of it comes from her, too fast for Wert. Slowing, she addresses him lesson-style. Fereydoun, frowned over by those furry brows of hers, gives verse for verse: “She does it for the honor of the revolution.”

  “Oh—ff-augh.” Wert can’t help himself.

  “At first, she swore not to speak it until you Americans left.”

  Wert shrugs.

  “Now she finds she doesn’t want to speak it here.” Fereydoun shakes his head over her next sentence. But Wert has already heard it. She wishes she’d never learned American. She hates it here.

  “But when she goes back—for the regime will change again, she says—they’ll have to let her speak it if she wants to, teach the others even.”

  Same like coming out of chador, she hisses to Fereydoun, her lip trembling. I miss chador, even. But it is my right…Don’t tell him this.

  Fereydoun looks from one to the other; bows his head.

  “Oh my poor bitch—” Wert’s already said under his breath. What a mix-up. He walks back to the chair in front of hers, sits, almost takes her hand in his, thinks better of it.

  “Speak in French, you two,” the old man says. “Go on.”

  Or break down into Farsi? Though probably he couldn’t keep up with her. Besides, she’s the kind of girl who on her own makes men feel hostile; it’s not her ideas. “Soyez bienvenue”—he begins. But he can’t hack it; he, too, has his pride. “Came here to say that, you know. To offer what I can. But this is my country. What it offers is in American.”

  She does have a glare. May even shine in the dark. Still, it’s a wonder her Iranian husband hasn’t got his rights from her.

  It’s the old man who explodes. Get on with it, girl. We’re not here to see you alone, remember? To Wert he says, “I’m hungry. And it’s almost time out there.” He titters. “For the wedding.” To her he adds, It has to be done. In a hurry is better. Remember—what you and s
he both owe Bakh.

  She doesn’t hurry. Everybody always owes Bakh.

  The old guy stamps his foot.

  This one will owe too, she adds, staring at Wert. I did not admire those letters. Shrugging, she stands up, clasping her arms in front of her. So be it. It’s the gesture of the chador.

  Standing in front of Wert, she’s not as tall as the dark dress presents her. Is this man worth it? she flings over her shoulder. Then straight up into Wert’s eyes—I spend my life to watch. Her eyes are the brilliant Kurdish blue which sometimes travels east into Azerbaijan. Suddenly she breaks her stare with a princess clap of hands, opening her mouth wide. Her yell splits just past him. For a minute he sees horse and cavalry in his head, and raised sabers, then a door to the next room opens and a skinny servant in chador runs toward them barefoot, though he sees no feet; this one is the floating kind the superior ones used to be. She’s shaking her old head at Fereydoun. She won’t. I cannot force her. She won’t wear the black. The old man makes a sign. The woman wheels, catches sight of Wert, gives a shriek, spits a word at Soraya and turns her back, covering her face.

  “Madame’s bodgi, Mr. Beel,” the old guy says. “Pardon. She did not know any man but me was here. Now, Soraya, now. Tell the woman to bring her in now. Time’s short. Forgive me, Mr. Wert.” He mutters to the servant. She doesn’t move.

  You old fool, Soraya says to Fereydoun, not turning her head. She’s staring at Wert. Irish eyes, he used to pretend them, in the mountain-shadow of the Elburz. Sometimes a woman showed only one. You old fool. Your Mr. Beel understands Farsi.

  She smiles slightly at him. How could he ever have thought this girl was—whatever he had thought her? “Vows are vows, Mr. Wert. But I also promised Bakhtiary.” In English her voice is different, though it’s not the voice heard on the phone. “I bring you a gift from him.” She purses her mouth. Is she going to kiss—do they now? In Iran he was celibate. Flying occasionally to Thailand, where he had a girl, or when he could afford it, to Berlin. Most of the Iranian girl-students had had generals or other officials for fathers. He’d succeeded in thinking of even the westernized ones as shower-curtained from ear to floor. But the real anti-aphrodisiac had been their snaffled minds.

  She whistles. Peeoooooeuuuuuupewi. No, a whistle can’t be annotated. Call it the warning scratch a prince’s cleats made, climbing up the glass mountain. When he should be hell-bent in the opposite direction.

  There’s a scuffle and a laugh from behind the door the servant skimmed back into; then a girl saunters from it—at first glance the kind of American girl he’s just seen in Washington, or on the prinking streets of nearby Georgetown, airing along on white-stockinged legs which end in those fuzzy pink anklets and childish splat sandals, in just such a short skirt, too, and pink turtleneck, her head shining like a sheared button. A bag swings from her shoulder.

  Seeing Wert she freezes, as if she hadn’t expected to see him in the spot where he is. She’s not a patch on Manoucher’s wife for dramatic presence but informally prettier, in a candid way which might almost be American. She wears makeup, he sees, when she comes to stand in front of him. But she’s certainly Iranian; the nose has the exact curve of Soraya’s, though a freckle or two masks that. Now she’s flushing, head bent. Perhaps she, too—like Bakh’s bride-to-be—is only just out of chador.

  “So you won’t wear black,” Wert says mischievously, as to a younger sister. “Az molaqat e soma xeyli xosvaqt am—I’m very glad to meet you.”

  Why does everybody look frightened but pleased?

  “The other Soraya,” Fereydoun says ceremoniously. “She was born the same year as Manoucher’s Soraya here. And named the same. So that is what we call her.”

  Not a sister then. “Your half-sister?”

  Manoucher’s wife slips her arm around the girl’s waist. They’re of a height, but it’s hard to believe them of an age. Though marriage hasn’t fattened Manoucher’s wife, it has filled in certain psychic outlines, as marriage does even if unconsummated. He sees now that though the other girl mustn’t look her age, she’s no teenager. Only unmistakably single. Manoucher’s wife’s smiling at him again. “No. My aunt.”

  Behind them all the door from the stairs opens, admitting Madame. She halts there, appearing to stare fixedly beyond them, as a sentry would, only toting a saddlebag instead of a gun. She bows to Manoucher’s wife, who barely bows back. Slowly one woman after another files through the door, until Madame’s surrounded by a thick circle of them; half the women from the other apartment must be here, at least thirty. In the stagey colored light they loom like a tribunal focused on him; what’s he done? Their jewels flash red, green and blue with primary power, and with a holy white. Is this an auto-da-fé—for his being American?

  It’s as they trot forward on their high heels, herded in by grim Madame—but breaking up into their twos and threes because they’re women and instinctively make any line a confab, that the truth comes on him, along with the shock that the name doodled twice on the telephone pad is his own. Just so, walking with a crony, one dusk in Tabriz, they’d met up with a clump of women, a perfumed cloud of them in chadors nothing like the servant-kind, being let into one of the blank, knockered doors in the long, continuous wall that concealed the houses, all with sizable courtyards, which made up that section of the city. The crony, a high-ranking clerk at his own Embassy, had excitedly pulled him back. “My sister Parvin—this is the third time those women have visited her—a very fine family. In our country the women pick the bride. This visit means yes. Better we not go in after all. She’ll be making tea for them.” As they’d walked on to an ordinary teahouse, where women were of course not admitted, a fact he knew as well had come upon him more forcibly. All along the wall, the brass knockers were women’s hands.

  The groom?—Wert had asked his companion. Oh, the women may bring him along, next time. Had the groom and the girl ever met? Oh yes, at the university. They like each other. We’re not that old-fashioned. Mehrdad’s teeth had been like Manoucher’s Soraya’s, almond-white, untouched by tobacco. “But when it’s time for ritual, we revert. Don’t you people do the same?”

  Wert wished hard and sudden for his cousin, far away in a big old house now only a block from a gas station, yet in a town where certain people still did just that. Ordering the traditional magnolias from the florist if necessary—as had been done at his second-cousin-once-removed daughter’s wedding—and tying them into the trees. He could telephone to ask her opinion, which she always gave overpoweringly. Cousin—under the circumstances, am I the bride, or the groom?

  Better still, he could fly there. Away.

  On second thought, he’d rather not let his cousin know. Women fester toward a wedding, their very skin irritated by the sight of the male in the single state.

  His best gambit, the only decent one, is to be stupidly polite. Speak to the aunt.

  “Do you—speak English?” Wert said. Englisi harf mizanid?

  Everybody clapped.

  Not the two girls, who look uncomfortable. Nor Fereydoun, who glances at his watch—and who may have an understandable lack of interest in weddings.

  “Don’t fuss, Ferey,” Madame says in French. “That damnable program’s been delayed another hour. Paris just telephoned.” To Wert she says in English: “My husband’s wedding will be broadcast from Isfahan, but on the—the—what is it, girls?”

  Manoucher’s wife doesn’t answer her mother-in-law. Her neck grows an inch.

  The aunt tucks in her chin, modestly. “Satellite.”

  The women purr admiration, passing the English word like a ball.

  He wants to clap.

  “Machines, tons les deux, my nieces,” Madame says. “This one”—she points to her daughter-in-law—“a speech machine. And the other Soraya—what are you, hmm?”

  Wert waits, fascinated. That beautiful dove-voice, the voice of the phone, what’ll float out on it? She’s hanging her head, as one does in her country when young, subordin
ate, yet admitting a fact to one’s credit. “Computer programmer.”

  “Are they not beautiful together!” bursts from one of the women.

  His ears burn.

  Fateh rescues him. “Brought up together, Mr. Wert, all their lives!”

  A humming from the women. He recalls the cronies, their moist-eyed tales of masculine devotion. Are these girls the new-style heroines? “Did you say—nieces?”

  Over there behind Madame, everyone giggles. Seems he can’t make a wrong response.

  Fereydoun intervenes. “It’s very simple.” But he’s grinning. “The other Soraya’s mother is Manoucher’s Soraya’s grandmother, married at twelve. The grandmother and her own daughter—Manoucher’s Soraya’s mother, had these two girls the same year, the grandmother first. The father of the other Soraya happens to be Madame’s real brother. The father of Manoucher’s Soraya is the half-brother of Madame by her father’s second wife—although this half-brother was actually only adopted into that family, being the son of the second wife’s dead sister. So Manoucher’s wife is only an adopted niece; Madame made very sure of it.”

  “Otherwise my grandson might know all the parts of speech and still be an idiot,” Madame murmurs rapidly. “When he arrives.”

  “Otherwise—” Fateh raises a ruby-nailed finger, pointing to the girl, “we would have send her first. As the aunt…and so talented, Mr. Wert.”

  “Bakh? He would have sent Manoucher both of them,” Madame says gloomily. “Lucky, your country does not allow.”

  “Madame does not approve,” Fereydoun says. “Of the old Islamic marriage. You may recall her family modernized it.”

  A silence. Everybody’s recalling. Shah. No need to say it. Shah. “And Reza Shah,” Wert says.

  “You don’t approve of more than one wife?” Fateh seems to be asking this question for herself. The shadow from her false lashes cross-hatches her pupils, reminding him of the x cartoonists used to put in the eyes of a character meant to be blotto. Under all her beige, yes, that other woman.