Mysteries of Motion

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Mysteries of Motion Page 41

by Hortense Calisher


  “Where’d you prefer to sit, Mr. Beel?”

  Not with the men. Their poker-faced swapping dries up at his approach; he’ll learn nothing. Where are his own letters to Bakh now? The daughter-in-law doesn’t admire them; he’d be interested to know why; he admires her. A man would always know where he stood with her.

  Madame and she are now on the dais, facing the crowd, where many of the women cling separate in the old style, leaving an admixture of couples of all ages, including several striking young pairs got up like internationally gilded statuary, and those few hormonally neuter old bodies who at their age were permitted anything. He doesn’t see the girl. The aunt.

  “Let’s sit at the back.”

  Fereydoun hesitates. “You Americans. Such democrats.”

  Near the staircase to Manoucher’s apartment is a short row of empties which must be reserved for the servants; two in chador are already at its farther end. He and Fereydoun seat themselves at the other.

  “Who’s that tall guy—he going to speak?”

  “Our former chargé d’affaires. No—he’s just—”

  “Showing himself.” Always a lot of that, anywhere in government. Power emeritus, among the displaced. “I suppose—Bakh won’t speak?”

  “The marriage ceremony does not require it.”

  Fereydoun’s one hand, crumpling restlessly; opens to show a string of worry-beads, a fine one, small evenly worn globes of some cloudy quartz over which the thumb can move contentedly. At first sight of such beads, one might think them rosaries, but their use had been laic, subtly somewhere between the cigarette and the psychiatrist, a social admission that men must fiddle. In Iran, a colleague trying to use them to help break his cigarette habit had found them useless to someone lacking their intricate vocabulary of social reference. They were a habit always significantly of the background, and always masculine. He’d heard it was considered lower class to swing them. The cultivated could make them seem a sensuous pursuit, not a nervous one. They were old-fashioned now. Bakh had never used worry-beads. Or never in front of Westerners. But Fereydoun’s watch must not be enough for him.

  “And Manoucher…will it be dangerous for him to show himself?” Never mind, he thinks, watching the beads slide, jerk and slide. “Don’t bother to explain, Fereydoun. There’s no logic in revolution.” Not even in history. We only lead ourselves to expect it. That is how we intellectually live—even the illiterate. Wert glanced at the two serving-maids. Maybe those most of all. Bakh, relinquishing his son only because he sensed the regime was falling, only to let the boy align himself with it—and now mending his own fences with the holy men, must have known this from the beginning. It’s all a walking-on eggs, he’d written. Between versions of that greediest of all egalitarians, Bill—the natural ape.

  There’s no logic but compensation. That’s what these people know best.

  The old equerry’s now looking at him in such open pain that he half wants to take him in his arms. “The bride, Mr. Beel—” he says in his high voice, “she doesn’t need to speak either.”

  Wert sat. Terrible to see a man of that age pacify himself, a revolution, and God knows what all, with a canny string of amethysts. In Wert’s own heavy daytime brogues his toes spread, seeking surface, and delicately retract. “I know. They’re sent.”

  Fereydoun got up. “It’s beginning.” On the second screen, blank until now, an agitation of images has begun—a house, a garden torch-lighted, major-domos and waiters, food tables al fresco, and a trickle of guests in evening dress—from the embassies? Farther behind is a somber crowd, more solidly packed, from which the camera skitters back to tables stiff as cardboard, the food still unattacked. Whether the camera is badly maneuvered or pseudo-artistic is moot.

  “Wait. What is that place?”

  “The hospital. In Isfahan.”

  “And that?” Wert points to Bakh in his chair and the leaning girl.

  “Their house in Teheran.”

  “When?”

  “When? Why, I suppose when the girl first came. Some time ago…But that up there. That’s the hospital all right. The garden, yes.” He leans forward judiciously. He must have been a palace man all his life. “I’ll leave you now. My place is with Madame. But, Mr. Beel—that staircase behind you leads down also. We’re very late. One of the maids can show you out.” He flicked an eye toward them. “If you must fly.”

  So they’ve tried—is he admitting? Starting all the way from London, or even earlier, from those palace reserves of obligation where they store people like Wert. Where ever since Venice, he must have been kept.

  If he stays, what a confidant this Fereydoun could make. Mere colleagues like Nosy pale beside him—and his clan.

  “I liked the boy,” Wert said.

  “Boy? Manoucher?” Is Fereydoun going to titter again? Instead, a surprisingly heavy fist comes down on Wert’s shoulder. “He was there.”

  The lights dim as he leaves, a genie receding. Except for the two maids on the row, who don’t count, Wert’s left to himself for the first time. So abrupt is the plunge back into this familiar, slow-breathing, cud-in-the-mouth self of his when in crowds, that he examines it. Is this his favorite state of being? Or a cul-de-sac from which Bakhtiary, with ambush if necessary, hopes to rescue him?

  Around him, conversation’s not fading. Their sense of attention is different, requiring constant formal annotation aloud. Very out loud or very hush-hush; that’s how they live, not much middle ground to them. He’s all middle ground, Bakhtiary’s told him. His country’s taught him to be. Oh there’s ashcan violence in your cities, Wert, stifled mass murder in your suburbs. And political murder, if you can call what’s random or mad “political.” Bakhtiary can’t. All Wert’s own aggression, he’s pointed out, is now in his country’s bombs, and all his once valuable personal secrecy. Your bombsights are now your people’s chief organs of meditation. What barbarians you’re teaching us to be.

  There’d been a convention of Western philosophers at the Teheran-Hilton; Bakhtiary had wondered why. “Maybe to observe our code of violence, which is in our daily living, dear Bill? A head lopped off, here and there. A mild thumbscrew, to clear a man’s head so that he may perhaps keep it. Or a skin-peeling, to correct a woman’s. How civilized—to be able to suffer personally for one’s views! There our women are even more equal than yours. They guard our secrets, you know, like the Pentagon does yours. So we must guard them.”

  On the video screen, Bakhtiary himself is now advancing. The short, sturdy feet plant themselves steadily as the camera travels forward. Wert can’t see the backs of them. Bakh’s wearing one of the deep black suits of thinnest silk which they used to affect in the worst heat for formal occasions. Here in Queens in snow weather, some of the men are wearing them. In that blazing garden of the still photograph at the left, Bakh’s suit is white—for engagement time? The video garden on the right-hand screen is a nighttime one, but well illuminated, and as the saying goes—“live.” Though even so, a viewer may be struck with certain cliché album conclusions on the passage of time.

  The announcer comes on, to a low spate of “Ahs!” from the audience; he’s a young Iranian whom many of them know from Paris. Speaking English with an Oxford accent interspersed with French, he ripples out a long list of Bakh’s credits:—industrial magnate, adviser to the new regime. On that pause, the camera shifts. The ayatollah is coming forward. The audience sighs. “Ah, that one.” We progress from comfort to comfort, Wert thinks. This mullah’s name isn’t yet known to Wert or his newspapers, but he is plainly an important one. His wrappings shine powerfully, properly subordinating the face, which appears to listen impassively. This is Mr. Bakhtiary’s third marriage. Though his holdings are in the most modern industries, and he is expected to help regularize the regime’s management of these, he himself has always kept to the Islamic laws in his private life.

  And perhaps he has. With such scant outward change. Ninety years, what has he done with them; what’s b
een done to him? Is that jaw slightly swollen, or merely thrust forward? The necktie loosened? People here are murmuring what people do; the tenderest audience can’t help scavenging. “Those dark glasses, I wish he would take them off.” Everybody wants him to look at him or her personally.

  So does Wert.

  The bride is from a family prominent in Ardebil. At last, a shot of the bride, in heavy white and a headdress, surrounded by women, somewhere inside the house. Silence. Then a cry from the dais: “Yes, her father has a string of sweet-shops, very prominent.”

  Fateh is made to shut up, not without laughter.

  His eyes are getting used to the partial light; he can see Madame. She’s shed her sweater set at last for a gown which should glitter when she moves. It doesn’t. There’s no code for translating her feelings. He tries to imagine his mother, separated for half a lifetime from his father, presiding in public acknowledgment of his father’s remarriage. With these people, though, it’s not remarrying—while we’ll continue to say that even when a man is on his eighth wife. For them it’s been onward-marrying, as much for clan as for the man. Gallinaceous birds, we are—Bakh had once informed him. Look it up, pal. He had to. Ordinary domestic fowl. But what Westerner, if reported this, would honor it?

  Minutes ago he was hungry, now hunger’s gone, down wherever other intensities send it. He can’t name what these are, except that his chest seems to be surgically widening. There’s always the staircase, if coming alive gets too much for him. Glancing along the row, he notes that the nearer chador is wearing dark glasses, a Western modesty. He’s never seen those with a chador. Another reportable fact.

  In front of the television screen here, someone’s placing a tray of sand molded into hieroglyphs similar to those etched in the sand of the tray at the feet of Bakh and his girl in the still photo. Now the real Bakh—or the one moving on video, is seating himself. As the camera advances, a third tray can be seen on the screen, in front of Bakhtiary’s chair. The trinity of them—in still, on video and one actually here on the floor before them all—is eerie past ritual, suggesting a fourth dimension behind all these submissive replicas. Bakh, the real Bakh, is now looking out at them here. Behind him is the real scene. Is he noting the differences?

  There can’t be many relatives up there in that sleuth-crowd pressing silently behind Bakhtiary’s chair. For one thing, so many are here. On the other hand, there’s no mullah here. No roses. Not a one; that’s strange. Queens has florists, flowers. Maybe this crowd hasn’t yet brought itself to believe in them. Though the row in front of him is rapt.

  The mullah’s now addressing the camera from beside Bakhtiary’s chair, raising his right arm up down, up down. On the mullah’s face, which Wert always thinks of as a single generic one, is the stare that such faces always had there, not inward or meditative but fanatically forward, past the flock itself, toward the letter of the law. Yet always full of secular gall. Wert had never seen one without it. They seem to him the most quick-tempered of man’s priests. Is this one reading the Koran, each time scowling up from a scroll half in his sleeve? No, he’s calling a roll—the names of people here. Each time he pronounces a name, Bakhtiary raises his own hand, in salute. Noises of assent come from the room here—an old woman’s long, wan agreement, a boy’s yell, quickly cut off, a man’s sobbing. The mullah is doing it by families. Each is having a different response. There are silences.

  Up there on the video, it’s a duel between the two old men wielding their arms, one speaking, one mute. The mullah—a talon, a sleeve and a spitting voice protruding from the country those here have left—is he excommunicating? Standing right there, mouthing on, he’s fading; he’s upstaged. Hossein Bakhtiary, raising and lowering his right arm, on its wrist a watch like Fereydoun’s, in its palm a long-stemmed rose, is winning. And why not? He’s doing what these here have had to do. He’s saying good-bye.

  The last of the names, sputtered unintelligibly, almost passes Wert by. Just then, Bakh removes his sunglasses. The hand grasping the teacolored flower moves forward, palm up. The eyes are the same. The mouth, closed until now, opens a swollen hole. Wert can hear its tongueless gurgle. Buh-Beel.

  They bring on the bride.

  Wert wants not to watch. Ahead of him, an elder is rotating worry-beads in steady pinwheel. There’s now no sound from this room, none of the woman-surf which hails a bride. Under the heavy headdress and costume which Ardebil has chosen for her, the slender body opens and closes obediently, a white fan manipulated from behind, twice refusing the gold bracelets offered her, a third time accepting, eyelashes fanned on her cheeks in the one close-up—while sugar is sprinkled by one of the two contending retinues, both sides in chador. To sweeten the mother-in-law, the announcer informs, his voice perfunctory. Even the camera is restive, disdaining this secondary creature with her trail of “old custom” dragging behind, and her not-to-be-dwelt-on life ahead—whose mother-in-law, dead in childbirth, as Wert happens to know, was a girl her own age, surely sweetened now by ninety years in the grave.

  A camera is never embarrassed. One more flash for the bride’s “beauty,” whiter than the rest of her, then a close-up—of Bakh’s. The lens moves on to the brilliantly lit food tables, pointing out epergnes. The smell from the Queens kitchen mingles with them.

  All the wedding gifts go to the nation. They are on the longest table of all, in huge assortment, more ransacked than piled. The lens travels at table level, like a child’s eye. “Look—Grandpa’s silver samovar; did we give it?” a young girl two rows ahead hisses clearly. Finally, the camera traverses the crowd. There, tall as a trophy, between two mullahs, and behind him a third, is Manoucher.

  Quiet now, not even a sound track humming. Over there in Iran, has noise been confiscated, too? Wert can hear the separate breathings around him—even at the end of his own row, from the nearer chador. The pinwheel up ahead has stopped.

  A cry then from Manoucher’s wife, from the dais. “Manoucher! How thin you are. It is only five weeks.”

  True. That same coat he was wearing in London now hangs on him. Taffy under the hot lights, it hangs from him in points, like his own flesh running from him. What are the seasons there now? Tabriz may be under snow, blue-glass afternoon ski slopes, with the brass samovar stuck in a drift. But Isfahan’s warmer. Why’s he wearing that coat?

  The camera won’t answer. It’s scouring the façade of the hospital behind the crowd, running briefly over a plaque showing that Hossein Bakhtiary was donor of it, returning frantically to rock past the tables of loot, saying without a word, “Palace to palace, to nation…loot eternally.”

  The smell from the kitchen here in Queens is imperative. In the deep iron skittles which they’ll have brought over here whatever else they left, the long-kerneled rice is forming that bottom-crust which will be scooped out like brown lace, to be screamed for by the children, dropped on the plates of the favorite. Left too much longer, it will burn. But up there on the screen, the plates on the food tables are yet unserved, the heaped melons, green under the false rays, will warm and rot in memory, or be left forever celadon; the camera’s done with them. Barging on, it’s pushing Bakhtiary’s chair, now seen to be on wheels, into the hospital façade; he’s in a room of bright chintz—a suite, it is, and once more he’s facing front. His hand no longer holds the rose. The dark glasses are on again. The bride is entering.

  Where’s her retinue of family women? Gone. Frantically as a gossip columnist, the camera hunts for them, finding only bowls of roses on tables, underscoring banks of these nodding on the deep windowsills—there are roses everywhere! It probes the dewy heart of one of them, and floating dreamily on, finds the bed. A hospital one. Quickly away—though not too quickly. Find the couple who’ll lie on it. In a last roulade of the room, avoiding bric-a-brac now for final truth all in beautiful color, it finds them. Bakhtiary braces in his chair, his bride at his side. In the background, stage right, a chador’ed woman is briefly profiled, just entering. A proper royal t
ouch. As the camera drains away, the married pair face it stolidly, like ancestors. It drains them away.

  An announcer godspeeds them. Ici Telefrance.

  This is no ordinary wedding babble. People are crowding in front of the dais, hiding it. Wert rises. He ought to leave here. He’s going to learn too much. Six chairs away from him, the nearer chador’s now alone. He’s seeing it through the wrong end of the opera-glass, a minute ago big as life up on the video screen walking through that marriage-chamber door, then traveling thousands of miles to sit, infinitely reduced, on a folding chair. So that same pattern of dull gray flecked with orange is worn in Isfahan? How often with dark glasses as well?

  Walking over he’s off balance, stepping through arranged illusion. He stands over it. How many chadors wear such perfume, expensive stuff, no raw musk. Or is he bewitched by video roses? How right he is to fear machine shadow-play for not even spying, for being only the colorless agent of connection. How pleased to find it negligent. A camera’s thought processes are as ingenuous as a child’s. Its sins of omission have to be similarly forgiven. He stares down at the feet beside his. Pink socks.

  The chador is silent. Once it was their women’s desert mackintosh. Could they help it if their charms doubled inside it, or if they themselves doubled in another sense? What’s it like inside that tent now, for a girl dressed like any girl from Georgetown? Blazing with new thoughts, yet still pressed with harem voices? Under which the muddy current of the dynasts is always creeping anyway, even in the smartly bared flesh of the women he knows.

  That wasn’t her doppelganger, up there just now in the honeymoon bedroom, yet somehow arrived here the day before yesterday—with those metallic words on her tongue: Programmer. Satellite. The apersonal procedures we give these people—they emotionalize even those to their own use.

  Fereydoun said: Manoucher was there.

  He bends over her. “What we saw and heard just now. It was a tape, wasn’t it?”

 

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