Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The ambassador who believed in real talk. Remanded to an insignificant post by a President who didn’t.

  “Yes, I remember.” Nosworthy knew how we younger ones admired him. Uncle is pulling out all the stops. “And I recall the incident.”

  The ambassador had read out to the two of them a Manila newspaper account of a Filipino who’d cut off the testicles of a man who’d deflowered his sister, and had thrown them into a public refuse can. The paper had reported the victim as attempting to retrieve them, then exclaiming, “Oh, what’s the use?” Shouldn’t laugh—the ambassador had said—yet people do. Want to know why, boys? Just then an aide had come in, on the matter Wert and Nosworthy were there for. And the ambassador is dead now, and can’t say.

  “But that brand of punishment normally fits the crime, doesn’t it, Uncle? Doesn’t that bother you? Gail would never understand how Manoucher’s helping out Uncle Sam could be a sexual offense.”

  “Watch yourself, Bill.”

  “Everybody’s watching—everybody. I’ve a departmental interest in watching you and me face the violent facts.”

  “Don’t you go cosmic on me, Wert.”

  The girl spoke from behind them.

  “What’s she saying, Bill?” Nosworthy waited. “You’d better say.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind—interpreting. That was always my role, wasn’t it? Even though I’m not coming back to it.”

  The girl is speaking softly, ice water on his back. “She says…that Manoucher will now occupy himself…with the business of the family…like their cousin…Fereydoun.” Wert swallows. “That right now…Manoucher will be giving out the keys in there…And that…I am welcome. To…join them.” You only, the girl says.

  “Oh, those keys—” Nosy said, with compatriot chumminess. “He wouldn’t be parted from them, even in hospital. The Jews did that, you know, when they left Spain in the umpteenth century. Took their household keys with them. Very good hospital by the way. Old Bakhtiary saw to that. Saw to everything, didn’t he, Bill? Saw to you.”

  “That makes two of you. How much did you already know—or plan—in Washington, that lunch we had?”

  “Didn’t take much to see it. That sending you a woman was what they had in mind. Gail—”

  “Saw it at once, yes. And was it then you tried to recruit Manoucher?”

  “Told you in Washington then I liked the sound of him. When I got to Teheran, I—simply got in touch with him.”

  “You and Gail never got to Ceylon?”

  “Sri Lanka. No. Fell through. We’re still persona non there.”

  As in Teheran, and other places. As even in Jamaica in your own garden, behind a steel hedge no orchids can hide.

  “I only took soundings, Bill. Give me credit—he never even came to the Embassy.”

  To your hotel? Or a teahouse? What would that matter, in a bazaar-city teeming with as many small-boy runners as there are articles of merchandise? “And you used my name to put the screws on him.”

  Behind Wert, the girl says softly, “Manoucher would have gone anyway. On his own. As a Bakhtiary. You are not to blame.”

  Does Nosworthy really not know Farsi? He’s staring at her. But what he mouths is for Wert. “I am extremely sorry for him, you know. But you saw him slap her. None of them acts like us, Bill. When are you going to face up to it?”

  “I am facing it, Nosy.” He sees him brighten at the old nickname.

  From the diningroom he hears the mourning noises cognate anywhere, then above the rest a child’s wail, loosed because the adults have given way. Does he also hear Fereydoun? He turns to the girl, who nods. “Fereydoun heard of it first.” When she bows her head the bandage can be seen at her nape.

  “Come away with me, Bill.”

  “That what you came for?” He knows it is. To the rescue. One of us is in danger of going cosmic.

  “You can’t just leave us, you know. There are—”

  “Formalities.” And you’ll put the screws on me with them.

  The noise inside there is trailing off now. There’s a deeper hum. Prayer. Smelling as prayer always did in that country, stuffy with food.

  “Bill.” Nosworthy’s too smart to come close. His long hands slide into his pockets, his pleasantly quizzical face, neatly bordered by its stateside collar, cocks wryly. “What’s the use?”

  The Farsi comes from behind Wert, iron in his back.

  “What’d she say?”

  So the man really doesn’t know Farsi. Or not much. “She said—‘Get rid of him.’”

  How light on the stairs a man as tall as Nosy can be, going up or down. Halfway, he pauses. Framed in the stairwell window’s harsh, poster glare, he looks more than ever like Uncle. “I feel responsible for you, Wert.”

  “Oh—I feel the same for you.”

  Wert didn’t watch him go out. The years ahead would take care of it. He turned. “Soraya—?” First time he’s said it.

  She began to thread her own way through the empty chairs. He followed her. At the dining room door he took her hand. “Afterwards—you’ll let me take you to my cousin’s?” A formal proposal, which he thought she’d understand as such and indeed, she bowed. They led each other inside.

  Once again these people themselves pull him back from sentiment.

  Behind a long refectory table around which men and boys are ranged three-deep, the walls are a backdrop of silver, descending shelf by crammed shelf, from heraldic urns and huge ewers to samovars and lamps, to plaques and plates and goblets, to bud vases singly furled. A sheeny white shallowness came from the intricately matted surface of all Iranian silver, whether from content or the overiridescence of the engraving. The women are sitting directly underneath, clasping children, even teenagers, to their knees. Because he’s never had children, he often looks at them as if they are people. Disaster’s occurred somewhere above these small awed faces, even the youngest have a holy look of it; the oldest ones know their elders have horrors to keep. Keys lie all over the table.

  Manoucher, at its head, is distributing them, each time to an answering murmur, imprecation or prayer. He has taken off the coat.

  They seat Wert at the opposite end of the table, in the place saved. Ritual is in the room, good or bad; each time Manoucher hands out a key and hears the response, normality shudders closer to him. The keys are all of the same shape. When the last one’s been dealt, Wert hears his own name. An object is passed down the table to him. “Hossein’s—” the man next to him, no one he knows, mutters as he lays it in front of Wert. Flat, gradated segments of fine yellow ivory, incised in small double circles, form a fish of about four and a half inches long. He’s seen those double circles before, on amulets against the evil eye. One segment toward the middle is out of place. Wert’s eye is already mentally restringing it. Perhaps this is intended. The string itself is of the cheapest kind. One wouldn’t twirl such an object, but in a pocket the abraded ivory might be subtle and comfortable to thumb. Carefully, he scooped up the white fish, feeling its blind scales, and stowed it away. He has caught it, and been caught. Nobody says anything.

  Coffee, not tea, and powerfully sugared, is then whipped on the table by the women, with the same hushed but up-to-the-occasion air women anywhere assume in the sickroom, or after death. According to which women serve who he can begin to distinguish families, though there are enough of the tiny silver-framed cups for everyone.

  They must have known all these five weeks that Manoucher was in danger, just as they had carried with them the more ordinary family portent of a patriarch’s death. Bakh, gambling for his son, had even then entwined his gesture with his own roseate greed for life. A wedding—finally paid for? People repress their knowledge of violence as they repress their knowledge of death. Even these people? Or, scarcely knowing it, had they here made their first real entry into the new life? The new—ritual.

  Only Manoucher perhaps had repressed nothing. The night he and Wert had dined at the Garrick he must have known what scrutiny
might well be lying in wait for him in Iran, after the five years in New York. But he was the son.

  Across the room, the two Sorayas are once more together. Manoucher’s wife, recognizable only by her height and the way she clasps herself, is now in chador, a familiar one. They have exchanged. The other Soraya, in the borrowed black she has no temperament for, and bareheaded, is making no outer attempt to comfort her. There’s no need. They are complements.

  Manoucher’s coming toward him, carrying his cup: Must anything more be said, commemorative? Über allen Gipfeln—ist Ruh? Wert’s never been able to admire anything German separate from its nation—even Goethe. Probably these days many people feel the same about us. But death at least is always translatable.

  Say nothing. Another kind of effort is being made. The petal-shaped cup shakes in Manoucher’s palm. He drinks. “Some of these people have now no houses, Beel. In the past they have paid big house-deposit money here, which the agents will now not give back. But now these people get no more money from home. We have lawyers, but need perhaps a special one. You have names?” Manoucher’s sweat-beaded upper lip, seen without its mustache, is as long as his father’s. In boyhood he retrieved a motorcycle, kept all these years in a garden in Teheran. Whose wall now has no key. Or perhaps there’s no longer a wall. But business will be done.

  “I’ll—see that you get one. In Washington.”

  “New York is better. We will all be here.”

  In a body. When people first come to a country, this is what they do.

  “You’ll be in London, Beel?”

  “Not for long. Manoucher—I must speak to you personally.” As if from the first we haven’t. “I must tell you something.” Which you already know or suspect. This being what ritual is. “You’re the head of the family now.” No harm mentioning it. “I want your permission to take the other Soraya to meet my cousin. She agrees.”

  Now that Manoucher is thin, pit his smooth face as if from smallpox and you would get old Bakhtiary’s lineaments. No miracle. This is what happens between dead fathers and live sons. The minute Wert’s father was dead people began to remark how he resembled him.

  Manoucher set down his cup. “Rightfully, we should both speak to my mother. But she is—resting. She doesn’t wish—to see me.” His face is impassive. Gray is draining into it, but he persists. For him violence has logic. “She goes tomorrow to Switzerland. Soraya, my wife, goes with her.” He’s looking over at his wife, at the wrapped woman she has now become. “A lot of our money is there. They will…see to it.” But money, the restorative, the bracer, isn’t helping. He sways.

  Wert rushed to the sideboard, to a silver decanter which indeed did hold whisky. “Here. None of us has et.” In emergencies he became British now. As in sex, he became Southern again. The she-barrister had noted it. “Or perhaps you don’t drink alcohol. I forgot.” But Manoucher has already downed it. He sits with glass in hand. Over on the women’s side, Fateh’s two tarted-up daughters are kneeling in front of the two Sorayas chattering excitedly; news of the departure has spread. Of the two departures. Two and two; things are symmetrical here. Clans are. Ankhs.

  Over there, tradition’s inching again, this time by powder puff. The two gigglers, lips pursed, are lightly wielding long-handled ones over the other Soraya’s still face. Now they’re at the eyelashes with a brush, now intently at her lips, dipping each time into a tray between them piled bright with gilt jars, tiger-striped boxes and a suede roll of instruments. Life goes by tray here, and by whatever hieroglyph. The other Soraya sees he’s watching her. Under a last brush of powder, she sneezes. Perfume wafts toward the two men.

  “I had whisky first in London,” Manoucher says, staring. Fateh’s girls, deserting the finished Soraya, begin coaxing Manoucher’s wife from her veil.

  “At the Dorchester, I had it,” Manoucher said, turning his back on them.

  Children are drifting past, boys chasing girls, small toddling after big. “About London—” Wert says, “I’ll be leaving now anyway.”

  Manoucher’s head hangs. His profile gives the best of him, unaltered. Wert puts a hand on his shoulder. “Remember at the Garrick, eh? That cabby you hired? Soaking in oil you all were, he said.” It gets a smile. Manouch puts a hand on Wert’s hand. They stay so, clasped. After a bit, Manoucher takes a deep breath. “We were never in oil.”

  “I know.”

  “My father thought it always too—too—”

  “Impermanent.”

  “A bubble,” Manoucher says in Farsi. He releases Wert’s hand. “But, Beel, must you resign?”

  “Better so. I’ll find something over here.”

  “Ah—New York. Perhaps the UN?”

  “That haven for leftover diplomats? Sorry.”

  “Of which I am one.” A pause. Manoucher’s head comes up. “But yet with some—clout.” The usage is intended. It’s Bakh’s.

  “No!” Wert said violently. “I can’t. Go there. Not from us.”

  He’s forgotten the room of people. Their alerted faces are frightened, tender, vulnerable, proud, pleased. These two headmen have made a conspiratorial nest—and it’s working.

  “Ah, Beel—what a too young country you are.” In Farsi, Manoucher sounds even fatherly. “Marvelous. In politics, how you still stop to blame.” But the contempt seeps through. “It’s a waste in anything. But most in politics.”

  Wert bursts out hysterically laughing. People smile. The West always cheers.

  Manoucher nods back at them with dignity. “Besides”—he whispers in English—“that Uncle of yours. That baby papa? How could you think it? That it was him.”

  Wert’s shaking. Not much, nothing heroic. Just chicken-sick, that chile, the old home kitchen help say in his head.

  “Industry, yes—Much better to be there now, than in government.” Suddenly Manoucher reaches out and collars a young boy just dribbling past them. The boy stands shyly, squirming in his jacket and tie, the skin like dark dew, the eyes pure, the lips full with hope. He’s the hope of the world, Wert thinks—I never noticed it. Manouch cuffs the boy’s cheek. “Get Mr. Ordoobadi.” The kid rushes off, blushing like a page.

  Ordoobadi turns out to be the man who knows about banks and Wert’s relative in Baton Rouge. He also knows the name of the lawyer Wert might best procure for them. He speaks a fast-blending patois of Farsi and English. The idiosyncracies of almost any major American city’s country clubs are at his polished fingertips, and like the clubs, suffering from a certain industrial pollution. He’s been everywhere in the service of the Bakhtiary interests, from Beverly Hills, where they don’t scorn to be backers of a boutique which dresses the stars, “A whirlywind success!” to Huntsville, Alabama—“You know NASA?” and Florida—“You know Cape Canaveral?” Is Wert up on what Bakh these last years was into?

  “Space, I believe. Outer space.” The obverse of inner space? Wert’s never thought of it that way before, but in this man’s orbit it does obtrude.

  “I like best Texas, though. Fine red people. Fine hearts. And in New York, of course, the Kinkerbocker Club. You belong?”

  Hungry, light-headed, sick at heart—though that’s curiously fading, or blending with what may be sexual hope; we won’t call it love yet—he’ll believe even Mr. Ordoobadi at the Knickerbocker Club. “No, I’m a Southerner. Georgia.”

  “Ahhh. They are more honey-butter there.” Ordoobadi sparkles with what he knows well enough is his “line”—the more telling because he believes it. He’s divided the people of this country by color, which is after all how it began. Florida girls tend to be fish-belly white. “The poor ones.” He’s noticed the poor—and hopes we’re in control there. Thinks we are. “Also in Bridgeport. Very pale.” Washington? “Ah—a girl rainbow. But not only from yours.”

  “You’re a poet.” And under the gloss, one of my old cronies, to the life.

  Ordoobadi takes the compliment as due; all men of his race are. But at the moment real estate preoccupies him. Children are runni
ng everywhere with bowls of nuts and finger food; the intensive predinner nibbling has at last begun; the two old servants are circling. He waves a comprehensive hand, accepting a soft drink from one of them. Pity—but soon they must move from this neighborhood. “Too much brown.” Not blacks, no, and not Puerto Ricans. He doesn’t actually know what they are. He snaps a finger. A tall, good-looking boy appears. “My son. At Deerfield Academy. Mohammed, what are the people in this house? This neighborhood. Tell Mr. Wert.”

  “Doctors, nurses, orderlies, hospital staff mostly—from the nearby ones. Dentists.” The boy shrugs. “Airline stewardesses, personnel. They team up.”

  “No, you know what I mean. What are they?” Ordoobadi turns to Wert. “Twenty years ago, they begin coming here, I am told. From when your people leave their country.”

  The boy’s faintly smiling. “He means the Philippines.” He’s not being insolent. He’s merely been born too late to know Bakh’s generation and into circumstances which have made him wiser than his father. But two to one, he’s no longer the hope of the world. “Couple of them were at our school.”

  His father dismisses him. “Not like these.”

  “No. I’ve been in the Philippines.” Twenty years ago, that slow-moving squatter-crowd behind the Embassy—could some of those here—be some of them? This small, heartening seepage into Queens? “No, those boys would be the sons of the sugar land-holders, I fancy.” In the Manila opera house, their wives wore spun-sugar dresses, Jenny had joked. “Or of diplomats.”

  A servant is at Wert’s elbow, decanter in hand. They’ve noted him already. He pours himself one. “Whisky, Ordoobadi?”

  “Eh—no thanks.” He bows. “I have though many men in my busyi-ness, who drink it.”

  “I’m sure.” Representative Americans. Who, like anyone who joins a clan, will never quite make it to the top—even if not brown.

  From the grave, a voice he’s incontinently glad to hear. Now, Beel. Never think we’re as stuck in our skins as you are. When among you, we’re not observing our prejudices, but your statuses. Safest for us to be at the top.