Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Down at the bottom of his pile is his Decameron with its inflamed old red cover, gnawed from island days when he’d first scavenged it for what he thought was porn—and had found a human narrative he’s still in. Next to it is an older volume, small like so many from the early eighteen hundreds, a Voyage also. Discovered in his Boston library days, bought for himself only recently, it is fairly rare, but there are copies, one for sure he knows of, in the New York Society Library. He’s only spot reread it. It’s here for that ultimate emergency, nothing new to read.

  The dictionary makes him smile. All of them do; they have the amplitude of religions open to change. He can hear the variorum voices which have made this one, the committeemen chattering like senior apes, the dullards hired by the yard, their mouths as full of syllables as a carpenter’s with nails. Here and there a holier scholar is made to intervene, in a quote. Milton is his favorite. What fun it could be to catalogue all the quotes cited in one or other of the standard editions—has anyone ever? He has an idea the Oxford feels safest with Sir Walter Scott.

  Here it is. Psychopannychy: 1642. [From the medieval Latin psychopannychia and the Greek ψυχο—plus παννχιος lasting all night.] All-night sleep of the soul; a state in which (according to some) the soul sleeps between death and the day of judgment.

  A tic goes over him. He feels the glory that streams from the far reaches of the yet undefined.

  There is no quote.

  THE HYGIENE UNIT

  “SCARS—THAT’S WHAT LIEVERING WANTS,” Veronica is lightly creaming the welted purple grid on Soraya’s lower back. That rectangle so opposed to the curved lines of any body no longer makes her gasp. “From some holocaust the world could honor. War’s not good enough. Nor death either. Death would kill him.”

  Soraya giggles. “Holy wounds. He can have them.”

  “He won’t get them out there.”

  Both women glance up and away from the video screen on which the boxily white-suited and masked figures alternately float toward and recede from the looming curve, thrust from left-screen like a shoulder, of the vehicle which is bearing them all on. Lievering’s own position is constantly televised for him out there; he juggles that equation as he goes. At the moment his other companions are not visible, nor any reflection from the creeping plastic sheath in which they are at times enclosed.

  Soraya’s wing-bone quivers. “Who knows?”

  “Space-martyrs aren’t publicized.”

  Another shrug. Sometimes Soraya’s back seems more expressive than her face. “Many kinds are not.” She rolls over and lies face up on the Jacuzzi’s broad rim, which ingeniously houses both the waste system and exercise gear. Veronica lies on the opposite rim. Both are naked—the ultimate luxury aboard. Though they have only the tube of unperfumed cream, have nothing to boudoir-litter with and Soraya’s hair is razored as close to the skull as Veronica’s corn-rows, the pliant walls and air have acceded to their flesh and conversation; for the hour this is a feminine retreat. More likely, they’ll find a way to stretch the hour to two.

  The martyr Soraya must be thinking of is Manoucher. Each always knows who the other means, as if she herself had lived the life opposite; each has by now heard the other’s story so exhaustively. For Veronica, who has never had a confidante, even whose beloved stepmother never knew her inner life, these hours are like afternoons in a Platonic cave she never knew existed. For Soraya, whose whole early life and confidence had been wedded to women, this allegiance is expected—and never emotionalized. Though they’re sufficiently fond and Veronica has the single woman’s awe of the pregnant one, this hothouse closeness hasn’t necessarily made them love one another and will likely grow feeble when they part. There’s even an extra ease to it in that their minds are so unlike, as if their temperaments will moderate what their tongues can’t.

  Meanwhile, this part of their day is felinely cozy. The motion of the Courier is reduced to a kind of hibernation. Its designers made no provision for the harem gene, which may be why the harem gene persists. Veronica sometimes thinks of saying such things, but never does.

  Soraya, taking all this for granted, clearly never thinks of it. Her motto is: For Now. She admires German cars, Swiss hotels, but says it is better not to like any one country too much—a true internationalist. Skis, but doesn’t like ski people. Is anti-cinema. A world without children is dust. Torturers believe in the world still, she says; murderers have given up—death is their answer. While she was being tortured she gave them just enough of her life for them to go on with her. They gave her one bad fingernail, to match the brand on her back. That same week her cousin, the still-reigning Queen, sent home to the palace an entire plane full of pink marble; it was the death-wish monument. But Soraya still loves pink.

  When she met Wert in their first bedroom, every naked inch of him was scrutinized. She showed him the nail. “My scar he had already seen.” On the way south, he solicitously wouldn’t let her drive because of it: she correctly took this as token of their married life-to-be. But certain dowries had had to be settled first.

  Driving along, he wondered what she read—if she read? Islam, and Francis Macomber from an American short-story anthology at the university? Or the writer Reza Baraheni, who’d been in prison also, and maybe Che? She had answered only that she was not a virgin, which had been a lie. She had insisted Wert come to the bedroom she’d been allotted at his cousin’s, after the doctor, come to examine her back, had gone. There he might see the book left for him to see, on top of the open suitcase filled with the lingerie all the women behind her had contributed. Ah yes, he says, taking it up, expecting as he said later one of those soft French-oriental novels which household women seem to grab for and find anywhere—half Beardsley, half Lalique. She has since looked those up. He doesn’t ask who gave her this one tattered book she carries about, a cheap copy of the Gulshan-i-Raz; perhaps he guessed. If he had asked, she would not have lied. He says: “So you do read.” She is standing patiently, not naked yet, though she approves of his body. “Can you have children?” she says. He knew what she meant—would a son of hers be his first?—and had answered appropriately. I’m like you, Soraya; I don’t yet know. Then, with that smile, he began to show her that he knew everything else.

  In the wedding picture her legs are slenderer. Pink silk socks in Paris-version little-girl sandals—and a Folies Bergère maribou jacket soft against the lashes. She is not perverse, not at all, but her emotions, never on the surface, are blocks of marble down below. He can expect the grand from her, never knowing what. Americans are by nature a sad, depressed people, she thinks, lacking real jollity; that’s why they are the itchy leaders in transportation. She doesn’t care a hoot about the physical style of such things, gravity or not. Absorb the method, the style—like a ski suit—and go on from there. If you are detached enough you can do that. “If you have nothing.”

  But now she has. She has a calendar.

  She believes that she and Wert took so long to conceive a child because she once lied.

  There is of course no picture of her in chador.

  “In Brazil?” Veronica says now. “In Rio? Well, at least you all know where he is. Even if he never gets in touch.” It’s understood that she is still referring to Manoucher.

  “The other Soraya may not wish it. Nobody may wish it.”

  “I know.”

  “You do not wish it either, maybe.” It’s understood that Soraya refers to Veronica’s brother, Ollie. “For you, too, not knowing may be better. Even whether he’s dead or alive.”

  “A brother means the past, the family one. But maybe you’re right. Listen, was Manoucher ever more than a brother to the other Soraya? In her mind, I mean. Even though she married him?”

  “She was sent—” Soraya said. “Yes, she was soft for him. But she was sent.”

  “I used to think people who didn’t keep track of all family members or for any reason didn’t know where some were—that the only people who would let that h
appen were scum.”

  “Ah-hah. And now we are the elite.” When Soraya feels broody she doesn’t say so but will perform a little something from body-lore, like pinching her nose-tip to keep it from age’s broadening, or flexing toes upward to keep the metatarsal pads, those pedestals of the spine, open for energy, or in extremity plucking all her leg hairs. Now, of course, she has her belly to feel, for the fourth-month sign of life.

  “Stop looking,” Veronica says. “A watched pot never boils.”

  They chuckle.

  “That poor girl from Ardebil,” Soraya says. “She lost hers.” She is, of course, referring to old Bakhtiary’s child-wife.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Who knows? We have no one left over there. Not for years. But you know what?” Her voice lowers. Some new tidbit, as yet untalked of, is about to be dropped. “The other Soraya, when she is—not with Beel and me, you know?” She waits for Veronica’s acknowledgment. “She is supposed to be in Switzerland, at our house there. But I dream she is not.” Soraya appears to use the words “dream” and “think” almost interchangeably. But one is never sure.

  “She goes back, you mean? To Iran?”

  Soraya seizes the cocoa butter, which is what the tube contains, and begins circling her nipples with it, to make them supple for the nursing. “And maybe—to him?” She’s asking, not telling. What they do for each other is to unravel.

  “I don’t know about revolutionaries any more. Maybe I never did.” Veronica picks up the greasy tube, weighing it uncertainly. “Gilpin says—we inhabit revolution—like a house. Then, one day, we move on. Or the house is gone. But I suppose—you could keep going back for it.”

  “Like to a poem?” Soraya always hits below the belt. And then acts. Horrified at Veronica’s tale of abandoning the poem at the motel—confessed only after Soraya had revealed who she herself had been and would be in love with eternally, and oh what a release for both women—she had made Veronica grudgingly reconstruct it, line by line, she herself taking it down, since Veronica couldn’t bear to, and proving so good at her nagging sorties and pressing, hypnotic silences that the poem now existed again, if in the feathery Arab script its own author couldn’t hope to read. Soraya doesn’t understand the poem but she vows to set a computer to retranslating as soon as they arrive. She understands completely what the poem means to Veronica, diagnosing this in one shaft—“Oh yaas, it is why you could have so many mens.” She always pluralizes it that way. Though she owns many inherited adages beginning: “Mens—” they emerge sparingly out of the slim darkish face and steady brown eyes. It may be she’s beginning not to believe in them—or never has.

  “Manoucher was never a revolutionary,” she says now. “What they did to his body—it happens more than you think, in our history. Afterwards, such mens, to still feel—you know”—she raises a fisted arm, flexing a tiny bicep—“they have to have money, power. Money he has. But people also tell such men their secrets. So he would go back. To show Soraya.” She smooths the cream over her breasts so that they shine like armor. Her smile is rare, Wert normally smiling for both of them. “So—they show each other. But different.”

  “How?”

  “Because she is the revolutionary. They were the real ones. She and Bakh.” This is the name she’s been leading up to. To mention it a dozen times, probing for the opportunity.

  “And you,” Veronica says, proud for her.

  “Not me. I have the baby.” She shrugs, mock-deprecating. But triumph glistens on her. “For—all of us.”

  Veronica knows the story. In that still fairly recent ménage-à-trois, which she fancies the women have been as much parties to as Wert if not more, the race to be pregnant had been constant between the two wives, though kept from Wert, the women being united on that score, as on so much. Veronica has learned not to assume anything about that relationship. The one time Soraya had been infuriated was when Veronica idly assumed they must all three sometimes bed together. No, she had hissed, beet-red—“We are not whores.”

  “Do you dream—that the other Soraya will stay over there? And Manoucher?”

  “No! They quarrel. He will leave. Or maybe I dream wrong that he would come back to Iran at all. Maybe only she is there. To find out once again the revolution there is not for us. In South Africa, Latin America, we are, all over. Fateh in Washington, where her girls have married so well. She wants to marry, too, but she is so enthusiastic. And those rings she wears go off in a men’s eyes like bombs. Yet she has no money. She spent it all bringing Bakh’s library here. Thousands of crates, you cannot imagine. And thousands’ worth of bribes. Through the Greek port of Piraeus she did it. Such a giddy woman, to do such a holy job. But the mens, that library puts them off, too. So she is giving half the library to other libraries. And half to Wert.” Often she calls him that, rather than Bill. “For the boy.”

  “He’s probably reading Latin in there already. Let me listen.” Veronica applies her ear to the belly.

  “Silly. We won’t hear. We will feel.” She flutters a hand.

  “So we will.” That “we” touches Veronica. So generous, so maternally blind. If she herself were pregnant would she still be able to make these fine distinctions? Or, as in the other kind of love is there a blunting of the finest mind—and no turning back?

  “Why Latin? No, he is studying the Gulshan-i-Raz. So he can be trusted with his father’s precious copy.”

  The one Bakh gave Wert so many years ago, yes. This time the name doesn’t come, only the wise look over the kind of pawky detail even a devoted wife will share, or a devout—rememberer. Seems that Wert’s copy, though authentic, isn’t as precious as he thinks. Bakh, like many collectors, could be overweeningly generous with objects whose flaws only he knew. There was even a secret pleasure in that. But Bakh always denied suffering from the worst grossnesses of ownership. For his best objects he was only trustee, only waiting for a recipient as worthy as he. How did Soraya know all this? When her father went to prison Bakh bought her family’s collection, one by one. She herself used to bring each object to Bakh’s house, at which time the great appreciator would instruct her on it. In fairness, he often bought things of little value—though he would always point this out. Wert’s copy, which was one of them, is presently on loan to a university which luckily thinks quite well of it. In exchange, Bakh had given her the cheap English translation which went to prison with her later, where being in English it was suspect. She was tortured extra for refusing to say where she got it.

  “All these objects, always having to be rerouted, or left behind,” Veronica said, the day Tom moved from his flat, having disposed of everything to where everything should properly go. He can be a good donor because he’s not a collector; none of that stickiness adheres to him. He goes straight to an object’s interest; only now and then an interest clutches at him. Earth’s moving day, she said. Going to be that way from now on. Nothing new, he said. Always has been. It’s just that you and I—we’re not Pharaohs. Though you have maybe the look of one.

  Nothing new?—she said back to him. Tom, you always say that. That’ll be the day—when you find something new.

  Soraya’s waiting. “Or no—you know what he is reading inside there?” She pats her belly. “Yo-yo. He is reading yo-yo.”

  “Whatever’s that?”

  “Little magazines. Thick paper, big print. Thin paper, little print. Fancy language always. Bakh’s desk was always covered with them. His second desk.” The first desk, as Veronica knows, was swept clean of all but the roses, the onionskin paper and the pen. “Bulletins from the University of Double Meaning, he called them—when I myself was at university he was always showing me. Over a hundred prescriptions to them he had—quarterly, they would arrive, or sixterly. Come, have a little laugh, he would say—Summer or Winter Issue?”

  “Subscriptions.” Veronica is under strict promise to correct. “And sixterly,” she laughs. “A good word. But we don’t have it.”

  �
�And always he hummed the same over them.” Soraya bends over her belly. The cicatrice on her back bends with her, an embracing purple spider. She vibrates softly, a nighttime woman with carved eyelids and loosening mouth-curves. “Yo-yo. Yo-yo.”

  She was sent. To Wert by Bakh. Who’d first had her sent to prison for her views, because she wouldn’t marry him. Who before sending her to Wert dispatched Fereydoun to inquire of the prison matrons the color of her pubic hair. The color of my place, she’d said, soaping it. When I watched him die, she said, it was like watching an Alp die, that you have always lived under. That I had to be against.

  Does she know that she was always in love with him? Of course. So must Wert. And so they are joined, all three of them. To all the lost ones, as well.

  She wants not to dream. But she won’t get her wish.

  “Look—” Veronica says, “Lievering’s disappeared.” The screen is blank. “Sometimes do you wish they all would? Mens?”

  “They are not here by accident,” Soraya says sharply, but smirking. “And we are not.”

  Bakh hasn’t taught her double meanings for nothing. Nor Wert, who has explained to her how the recruitment of Cabin Six has centered around Mulenberg—“and around you, Veronica.” How Wert had been recommended merely because Mulenberg vaguely recalled meeting him in important company. “Businessmen of his class like to keep a handle on their world. Or what they assume to be theirs.” For Wert the possibility of easing what Soraya would undergo has clinched it.

  You learn too much from your men, Veronica told her, though she knows this to be an idea Soraya has no room for. To find that Gilpin himself had had his path smoothed because Mulenberg wanted to assure himself of her own presence—which Soraya had guessed at, was a blow, but believed at once.

  Shivering, she flips the tube from hand to hand. The gravity stipulated here is almost normal. Today it’s not quite that.

  Soraya’s watching her. “Wert says you can have any one of them. The big man. Or your friend. Or even—them, there.”