Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The sunglasses lift. They’re smoke-blue. He can just see her eyes behind them.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  The chador turns its back.

  “Why?”

  “Bakhtiary—wanted it.”

  “Why?”

  He can interrogate like this for hours. The chador hesitates; it can hear that. “The girl will have child.” There’s no dove-charm in this voice. “She is seven-months. The other picture was the real wedding.”

  Up ahead, people are finally oozing into the next room, where the baked meats must be. He can wait for the gossips he’ll find there, unsure himself whether his revulsion is from cancer or death, or from such a child, ruthlessly inserted into life, between both. But that’s what miracles are. Violences aimed toward impossible good. Tears smart his eyes. “When was this…second ceremony?”

  The chador considers. “Three days past…four? I—”

  “Hadn’t a calendar, yes.” Why’s he so angry? “Why would Bakhtiary want it?”

  “To help Manoucher. Everything—was for Manoucher.”

  From the dais, Fereydoun, seeing them talk, shrugs at them, nodding. He’s supporting Madame on his arm.

  “They all know then? That it was only tape?”

  “Madame—Fereydoun was to tell her. Just before.”

  No one’s helping Manoucher’s Soraya, still on the dais, eyes fixed on the empty video screen, hands dragging against her black. The chador, taking off its glasses, has dropped its veil. Offering her its face, if she wants it near. Manoucher’s wife's not looking, or not accepting.

  “And Manoucher’s wife?”

  “Madame must just have told her.”

  Questions he doesn’t want to ask crowd his head. Ask the least of them. “Why are you in chador?”

  When she moves, closing herself up again, he can smell the perfume, waves of it. “It’s—quiet, like this. And I am not—too much here yet.”

  Ask about her accent. Or run. “You were at school in Germany. Like Manouch?”

  “Switzerland. Only Manoucher had to go to Germany. Like Madame. Then to England. Like Bakhtiary. It was the agreement.”

  And afterward to us. And now finally, back to Iran.

  Manoucher’s wife is standing up. In front of her, a train of women moves toward the next room, walking with the prinking body delays of the gauded-up. She walks starkly, but following. The girl from Ardebil’s baby will precede Manoucher’s and hers—if they ever have it—an infant aunt or uncle, to that putative nephew or niece. The father’s child will precede the son’s. No wonder their men love flowers, bending brotherly over them, their own body-gardens budding so inter-generationally.

  Where’s Manoucher now? Who told Fereydoun? Why is Madame needing to be led away, that immobile dress of hers at last shaken to glitter? This ersatz Swiss miss—he’ll bet it was Geneva where her tongue was trained to tick like a watch and her brain also—what was she doing in that bedroom, caught by the cameraman, not by accident, not that camera, at the aftermath door of a wedding already so after-the-fact? Who but Bakh could draw her there—this Soraya, this other one?

  In the West, such a naming would be expected to have psychic effect, here it’s merely a family position, where every member is doweled in from all directions, down to the half-brother, half-sister variations, not all of it remnant polygamy even now, and still so multiform that not to marry too near within the blood takes scrutiny. Within enclosures so close. Where for an old man to marry a young girl is more than respectable, not necessarily to be frowned on because the girl happens to be the man’s wife’s blood-niece. If there are incestuous dreams attached to matching old with young—Wert can hear Bakhtiary say, indeed has a letter saying—then these are Western dreams. With us, Wert, such marriage is erotically just, and eugenically coveted. And—he didn’t add—male. No business of the women.

  The room’s empty except for the two of them, and the blank video. It’s Bakh’s calendar, why confirm it? Leave with your own riches. A last letter, a box suitably disposed of. That's enough.

  And he himself can answer all of this. “Bakh’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Then he’s shaking her, this wrapped woman who was sent to him like a rose-tree. Carrying a box to break for him. The chador falls from her, the glasses, too. His fingers inform how she’s encased. White bandages rise out of the wide neck of her dress, expertly overlapping like a mummy’s cerements. But they’ve persuaded her to something. The dress is black.

  He kneels. “How can I—I’m sorry.”

  “It’s only I heal. It draws together.” Her teeth are chattering.

  “You have fever.”

  “Not of the flesh.” From the chador’s folds a long silver-mesh pouch emerges. Like a sword, he thinks, a bumpy female sword, and with some of the same medieval necessity. She dumps its contents into her lap. He’s meant to study them. The pills are ordinary enough, the same compound the Embassy staff used to get at the PX pharmacy. Her hand brushes the bottle aside, the blunt, unpainted hand of any competent American girl, on it a signet ring. Under the bottle is an old iron key of the kind used to open their courtyard doors, a passport, a billfold, and a battered gold pen and pencil, on a chain. “My father’s. They let me keep it.”

  “I have trouble remembering. Imagining, I mean. That you were in prison.”

  Her eyes are brown, not that fanatic blue. “Because, yes—of your wife. May I have a little water?”

  In the bathroom, that sponge-strewn spa gilded with luxe from Paris and Venice, the toothbrush glass is an old etched tumbler in a cheap metal holder, the kind one used to get in any teahouse, but important to someone here. The money’s been coming over here for years but now they’re bringing whatever they can to remember with; even a Swiss bank account is not that restorative. His hand shakes, holding it. What she said was a shock, a shock, showing him not only what she knows but what she is. Bringing her the water, he can’t help seeing it. He’s brought two other women water in similar circumstance, Jenny during her menstrual cramps and his mother during her last illness. There’s character in the way they take it. His mother was a dramatizer; she drank her death in sips, and made him watch. Jenny drank with self-impatient shame. This girl’s even shorter on self-pity. She wants the water. No upward thank-you glance as she drinks. He already knows her eyes are brown. He knows more about her than is fair—that back, those breasts. The mouse will be black.

  With the pill, color and girlhood return to her. Aunthood—or is it clanhood?—fades. Would he always be able to tell the difference? He doubts it.

  “Funny. When I need to be strong, I don’t shiver. Only afterward. Over here. And on the plane.”

  He picked up the bottle, looked inside. Only the aspirin compound the bottle said it was.

  “The customs inspector, he looks, too. I tell him—no, we don’t hashish, we don’t drink, even we don’t smoke to like it. Only to be friendly with you. Our flesh is clean.” Her teeth are indeed white.

  “But you still tremble. And don’t answer questions.”

  She’s putting the articles in her lap back into the pouch, one by one. Under its silver mesh the shape of each is still decipherable, a support of a kind. “I did not admire Hossein Bakhtiary’s letters to you. Yes, he is dead.”

  He turned his back. That video screen, what’s it made of? Not linen. Nothing so mortal. “Of the disease?”

  No answer from behind him. The screen too has no opinion.

  “They kill him after the ceremony?” When she walked in there? Then why would they let her go, afterward?

  A light, shuffled movement behind him, the kind kids make in games; you’re guessing close, Wert, you’re warm. Or she’s gone, stolen away. She must want to. He wants her to.

  He turns. She’s at the head of the stairs, looking down them. On the way she’s dropped the chador. That cha-cha black dress they’ve given her is much too big for her. Even so, a girl like her might accept it to mourn the revolution in—a girl more comfor
table behind bars. Where there are matters to stand up for.

  “You kill him?”

  He’s surprised her. People judge his exterior incapable of such conceptions.

  “No? He wanted to marry you, though, Fereydoun said.”

  “Once, yes.”

  “But you refused.”

  “No one would believe it.”

  “Why?”

  “My father was already dead. In prison. We are the stupid ones of the family.” She’s fumbling in that purse of hers again, holding out a palm. The iron key is in it. “I have nothing.”

  There’s not a jewel on her except the signet ring; he should have noticed that. And they’ve given her none. According to his cousin, his great-grandmother’s ring had been hidden in advance of the Northern army first in the craw of a stuffed owl, then in a sack of spoiled barley, and as houses and barns went for burning, was several times swallowed by a faithful slave. Some people progress through history via their objects. He had hoped not to, if only by default. Envying these others, who travel so light.

  “Did Bakh—were you sent to prison because you refused?”

  “I go to prison because of myself!” She picked up the chador, smoothing it. “Soraya follows me. I am to blame. So then I ask them, to let her go. To come here—they will do it.” She tossed the chador on a chair. “So then—she ask for me.” Her face is a study. Fatalism? Too modern a word for it. There’s a rogue smile to it. “But yes, when I am first in trouble with the police, it is convenient for somebody. Fereydoun doesn’t tell you that.”

  He sees it. “Madame.”

  “Oh—Fateh, too. Those two are used to each other. But I? For a third wife? Even that girl is better.”

  On the other screen the bride remains, high above them, in suppliant curve.

  “So they found her—” the girl said. “Like you find a nurse.”

  Wert stared up at Bakh’s thickened mouth. Relieving to conduct this inquiry in his presence, even a token one. Ritual: the uses of. He’s learning. “He wouldn’t have killed himself. Not for pain. Especially not.”

  “Not pain of the flesh,” the girl said. “No. Or not of his own flesh.”

  From the other room, the dining quarters, there’s silence now.

  “He wanted to feel it there in the throat, he said. A knife. Nothing else would do, he said. He ask me to. I—could not give him that—satisfaction. But I agree—to watch.”

  So, the girl from Ardebil. Who will do for me, Wert, what I can no longer do for myself. She’s still up there in the photograph, curving toward nothing. “So. That’s when the camera caught you. When you came to watch. And—did she?”

  “No. Because of the baby, she wouldn’t. All these months what she does for him, you can imagine. She even lets him put the knife in her hand. But at the last minute, she wouldn’t. Because of the son-to-be, she said. Hers. And she ran out.”

  “Leaving—you.”

  “He picked up the knife himself. He could still walk; he is only so weak. The chair was for television; they said the audience could see how much too weak. They are very criticizing. But to do what he wants he has to sit in chair.”

  Up there in the photograph the tray of hieroglyphed sand is still at Bakh’s feet. Down here, the respondent tray has been cleared away. There’s such silence behind those swinging doors to the dining room; somebody’s telling them. The physical—everything in the universe is anticipated there. Dare a man say that? What then happens to him?

  “And did you watch as he asked? Damn you—did you watch?”

  I did. He heard it through a veil, a red thunder in his ears, the knife cold against his own throat, then warm. He found himself kneeling, collar choking him, the slide projector in front of him. He wrenched at the switch. The screen went blank. A white blackout, all the invisible girls gone, or kneeling. She isn’t. Her perfume sickens him, or is it her strength!

  His throat hurts but is whole. “Roses—all the way.”

  A death erotic to the end? A rosebed of mysteries, watched over by the unattainable girl, whose concept presides in all their heavens of the physical? Yet the pain which excused the old man to take himself off honorably wasn’t of the flesh—or not of his flesh. Then it must be the clan’s. Such an act, done in the stench of suicide blood but presided over by a white flutter of family honor, was what we called primitive. Two months from now, the babe would be born again, polymorphous as life itself. That is what we call perverse.

  How the Koran resembled the Bible. Old testaments. Behold the fire and the wood, but where was the lamb, for a burnt offering?…And they came to a place God had told him of, and Abraham built an altar and laid the wood in order, and bound his son…And the place is a hospital garden in Isfahan, where three mullahs guard the offering. With the father still thinking—I’ll save him yet…And the angel of the Lord called unto them Lay not thy hand upon the lad, for I know thou fearest God, seeing thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.

  But the mullahs were not angels and hadn’t withheld their hand. The stories were not the same; only the methods were. No ram appeared in the thicket, as substitute. And Bakh lost.

  It could have happened right after the wedding just witnessed, and before the bedroom scene. The camera had simply omitted it. A camera has no obligation.

  But I’m getting up from my knees with the answer in my mouth, as if I’m still Christian.

  “By then, they’d killed the son, hadn’t they?” he said. “Manoucher.”

  She’s leaning forward and down the stairs, her black dress whipped against the banister, retching the name. One arm flails. “Manoucher. Manoucher.”

  How they mourn. He’s envious. Such a fountain of grief, in Farsi of a range he’ll never have. Careful of her back—he’s remembering better—he stretches his arms to circle her.

  Two men are coming up the stairs. One is Manoucher. Lumbering ox-eyed, he hunches past the girl to stand in front of Wert. It’s the coat that’s dead, torn at the breast, muddied with handprints, smeared with the orange turd dogs used to leave in the streets there, as if they ate turmeric. Even so it’s kept its shape. The man inside hasn’t. The coat’s pockets clink as he shifts; there’s metal weighting them. He’s thin, but not enough to need such ballast. He has his arms and legs. Only the mustache is gone. Yet this body belongs to that coat.

  Manoucher’s cheek is laid against Wert’s, once, twice and rests there. Wert’s arms go round him as he heaves. This torn creature was never a boy.

  “Easy now. Easy. Told you I’d get you here,” the other man on the stairs is saying. A tall man with a face which could sit for Uncle Sam; he looks up. “Hello, Wert.” Nosworthy has a tan, maybe from Jamaica, maybe from Ceylon. Sri Lanka. He leans on banisters round the world.

  “What—”

  Nosworthy holds up a warning hand. Manoucher’s standing in front of the girl, his right arm moving in a plane between his face and hers; is he blind? Wert can’t see whether or not his pupils are moving. Grunting, Manoucher finds her cheek. He stands back from her, his pockets clanking.

  The slap makes her rock. A weighted dummy, returning upright the other cheek. Before the two men can act, he turns from her, breathing hard, a gone bull, the eyes red and small but seeing, and lumbers past them, threading the massed empty chairs with a nod here, there, as if to invisible occupants. At the door to the dining room he stops. “I bring them the keys.” He speaks to the girl. “You already have yours.” He bows to Nosworthy. “You will—you will be thanked.” To Wert he says nothing. The door swings behind him.

  Cheeks flaming, the girl’s fingering a tooth. She wards off both men. “He had to—” she says to Wert in Farsi. “Ah, poor—he never hit a woman before.”

  When he’s sure she’s all right he turns to Nosworthy. “What are you doing here?” A departmental question. Who could ever really answer it?

  “I was posted there,” Nosworthy says, still leaning. “Ahead of our new, new ambassador. He never got there. Seem
s we’re both persona non. On my way out, did a good deed on the way, that’s all. Poor bugger.” His long legs shift, tensing. Only symptom you could ever spot. “You don’t believe that—fully? Try.”

  “He’s not blind. What’s wrong with him?”

  “No. But he would rather be…Excuse me. This lady—you’re Soraya, young Bakhtiary’s wife?”

  “That’s why Manoucher hit me,” the girl says rapidly in Farsi. “Because he is head Bakhtiary now. And because I watched…But this man, I won’t speak with him.”

  “No, this is the other Soraya,” Wert said.

  It’s not possible to tell whether or not Nosy has heard of her. He deserves his rise though—if one can call it that—even if he doesn’t know Farsi. If one can be sure of anything about Wert’s sometime mentor. He’s a member of the Department. Leave it at that.

  “They offered him a choice,” Nosworthy said. “Blindness, or—it seems there are certain ritual—punishments. Though I’ve my doubts on the validity of this one. Young Bakhtiary chose blindness. They simply didn’t keep their promise. He should have known. They’re his people.”

  “What did they do to him?” He’s afraid he already knows.

  “She isn’t the wife, then?”

  “No.”

  Nosworthy’s still uneasy. “We’re not sure it was the mullahs, you know. Might have been—extremists.”

  “We don’t have to know, you mean—” Wert said. “But I have—an interest.”

  “So I see,” Nosworthy said. “She speak English?”

  The girl flicked an eyelid.

  “Maybe she’s taken a vow not to.”

  Nosworthy gets it. But what’s it to him if this girl in chador thinks he’s dirt? Tax him with the one thing he can’t take. “What they did to Manoucher,” Wert said. “Something you can’t tell Gail, is it?”

  Target. Now he’s lost a friend, if he ever had him. No cop-out that way, though. One’s always responsible for what one’s friends are.

  All Nosworthy does is to stand a little straighter, away from the banister. One has to admire. “I just don’t happen to, Bill. Tell her what I don’t yet understand myself.” His voice is gentle. Always was. Gentle hand, on Wert’s shoulder. “Remember in Manila—Chip’s time? That day we were in his office together?”