Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  By time we got to the Ungers however, more pressing news—a coup in Bangkok—a new one. Our Amb. left at once—did not reappear, and Unger left shortly after. Most exciting guest Seni Premo—former Amb. to U.S. during war, Foreign Min. and Premier here at various times—a lively versatile man—lawyer, violin-player—recited S. poetry asking me to note internal rhymes, and translating. Brother of the famous Kukrit. Wife (Lady Usna) had met at lunch and drove me home a few days ago—had a nice chat. (Correct title KunYing Usna.) Also nice Dutch-English couple—Vixteboyses—6 yrs. in N.Y. She had read my book.

  So leave me there, at the abrupt end of my only journal, in the midst of the only time I have been “present,” or with the inside bystanders, at an international “coup.” One so tame, that hindsight on that part of the world—and on the U.S. there—makes one weep for it. There had been a show of tanks in the streets, no blood. At the end, I am left sitting at table with our hostess, Pontecorvo, and Senator Fulbright, all the diplomats having hurried to their offices. (The British Ambassador, invited to dinner, hadn’t turned up; very smart man, I was told; no doubt had wind of it.) Neither Fulbright nor I can know that seven years later—when C, now legally my husband, using his journal to me as notes, publishes his memoir of an American in Persia—he, Fulbright, will write him an admiring letter on it (perhaps in answer to some in Washington who were disturbed at C’s now prophetic remarks on the U.S. role abroad).

  So the lights go out, and on again all over the world—and I have had my small taste of it. And I will get to Persia.

  I leave now.

  WELL, SCATHED OR NOT, I get there—for a few remarkable weeks. Then the children’s father cables through the consulate: Our daughter, who had had a breakdown at seventeen and is now twenty-one, has again dropped out of college—he cannot cope. I return to the States, taking her to live with me in New York, since the old homestead up the river is barred to me; until the divorce is final her father and I cannot share even a twelve-room residence without nullifying same, and he will not leave.

  In the school holidays, my son joins us in the pleasant enough flat I have found us; he is a bracing boy, but fresh from the close, eupeptic life of a big New England school, and a country boy before that, he finds this New York gray and depressing, though he does not say. I have no way of letting him into the delights of a youth-in-New-York I remember, and his own friends are elsewhere—we three are off the family circuit, and know it. I begin to understand the life of women so situated—a story called “The Scream On Fifty-Seventh Street” dates from that time. I am not teaching. Purposefully I sink myself into the role of mother; it is lonely. Now my daughter is healthy again and dating, and difficult; my jollier second child is again away at school. Sundays, those cold Sutton Place winter Sundays, are the worst. The trip down the block to the stationer’s is the event. Tabriz and I correspond, in faraway voices; we shall meet again of course. But for me, with my family as it is, motherhood is the waiting-game. Christmas, with such kind guests as let me scrounge them, has been grim. I re-learn a lot, even that city loneliness has its savor—one that a mind like mine, however, has to be wary of. I don’t remember working.

  Then, in the New Year, my friend writes asking that we marry. He suggests I fly over during Nan Rooz, the long Muslim holiday, during which he can be absent from the university, to meet him and marry in some country where we have never been before, perhaps Greece. A mad idea, I decide, knowing how mad it would be, not to. It is a case of the pearls all over again—I know my answer. And then, only then, I am free to remember Tabriz—in words. I write them—from memory. The “husband” is of course C.

  Over the queerly even cones of Cebu in the Philippines the plane dipped so low that we could see the branches of trees; hail to Okinawa, at one moment a jade-purple coastline denying all bloody history except the natural, at the next the “restricted territory” of a waiting room whose showcase wares of brown tins of Droste and subfusc “native” jewelry attracted only the wanderlust of flies; farewell to Hong Kong, enormous dream harbor over which one sailed three times, still choked with history, descended to buy a typewriter ribbon. cheaper than anywhere else in the world, have a hot bath, and move on. At Taiwan, standing on a landing-strip stacked with fighter-craft as pretty and gauzy as mayflies in the sun, one held on to last week’s Times, eyeballs converging on a headline, “Trouble in Taiwan,” and knew the newsprint Taiwan as still distant, more real than this. Such travel is lucid only in the sense that it is a shared insanity—everyone else has his feet off the ground too. And nowhere of course are there any real people, only other doppelgangers like oneself.

  Technically we were going around the world; in actual terms of sensibility, as we were reclined, fed, deplaned in orderly dislocation, meanwhile incubating what mental life we could, the world was going round us. Karachi passed us—a half hour’s wait, one lemonade, two turbans, but no exit; our bed was not to be in India, nor yet Teheran. But then, finally, we boarded a plane at once less tranced and more intimate, not only because it was a single-engine job and bumpy, nor yet because the hostess, though beautiful as any, wore hair and cap humanly astray, and wrapped us in blankets that smelled definitely of burro, nor yet even because the desert flowing beneath us was as familiar as a Sunday-school engraving. This vehicle, moving umbilically along to a firm terminus, was the last plane, ready to berth us out of the scenic into the static, back into a daily living, however rich and strange, in which we might presumably clasp hands again with our domestic selves.

  The city of Tabriz (Pop. approx. 350,000 local, 100 foreign—all real) lies in the northwest corner of Iran (once Persia) in a high valley of the Caucasus not far south of Russian Armenia, some miles from the great salt lake, Urmia, and some 18 hours by rail from Teheran. This is Tabriz by atlas. But my Tabriz (which I was to have to leave unexpectedly after a month—perhaps the ideal interval) lies in that never-never corner where we collect the house we grew up in, the one where we spent that summer, all those homes perfected forever by the fact that we shall not or cannot return. Mine is situated more precisely in one wing of a house where, on a certain afternoon, I might have been found sitting back of two high windows that give on a long garden which is in its turn behind the inevitable wall concealing it from koutche Ark—the Street of the Ark—which except for the high, rubbled ruin of the Ark itself is a yellow-dusted continuity of such walls, behind the main street, Pahlevi.

  Persian style, everything here is behind something else, including of course the women inside their enveloping chedurs, each a shroud walking, deep above whose facial crossfold, held in the teeth, there gleams, coal-pot brown or pale Kurdish aqua, the Eye. Occasionally there gleam both eyes, a sight at once lowercase and less eerie, but small reassurance to any shy dog of a foreigner. How is it then that as I sit there and will for three hours, while the burning welkin above the Ark declines magnificently toward the blue dye of the tea-hour anywhere, I begin to feel a certain burgeoning of welcome, the first intimations that even in this land of many screens I am no longer so coldly in front of the scene but perhaps a little way behind it? The answer lies behind me, in an oddly burbled noise which, as might be expected, is the sound of a cake. At home—or rather, in the never-never of North America—cakes make no sound except the hush in which the children are warned to tiptoe past the oven. But this is workaday Iran, where the economy is oil and I have no oven, only three wicked burners with characters distinct as the Fates: Sometimes Steady, Always Hot, and Out. This sound, halfway between cauldron and cabbala, is the sound of a cake boiling.

  It had taken me three weeks to get this far, by some hypocrisy and in a state of mind—often read about, recounted by grandmothers—best described as “suffragette.” Traveling alone until now, I had only once or twice delicately been reminded of the status of women in the Orient—on the night for instance when, while sharing a second-class sleeper to Kobe with three Japanese gentlemen, one of these, seeing that I was unfamiliar with their prerogative of
removing trousers, donning kimono, at ease in the aisle, had reached over and sternly pulled down the curtain, not to his bunk, but to mine. Here in Tabriz, however, I had joined my husband.

  Back in the States, boning up for our projected visit, my husband and I had noted in a study collated, I believe, in Princeton, that “In Iran, the roles of the sexes, as traditional in Western eyes, are reversed. Both sexes see the image of the man as that of the poet-dreamer-philosopher, that of the woman as the hard-headed realist whose business is to deal with the practicalities of life.” Or some such. What the report had failed to emphasize (or we to note) was how wide a latitude the dreamer seemed to have for his business, and conversely, how impracticably narrow the orbit in which the realist might take her exercise. To be sure, it was only natural that my husband, arriving first, had hired the flat, the services of the gardener-houseman, Hassan, and his faceless female adjunct, even christening the latter “Bodji” (in rude translation, “Maid!”). He had arranged with the landlady such details as what space belonged to us in the communal refrigerator, which afternoon she and daughter might spend in the only (ours) bath. With a month’s seniority in Turki bargaining phrases, it was merely sensible that he go before me in our first dips into the bazaar. Since Hassan, our shopper, did not buy our meat, our needs there being harder to pantomime, my husband would—I was to cook it, but one sight of the butcher’s bloody-wagon and I mightn’t be able to. Also, un-chedured as I was, it would be politer all round if I did not go out alone; later on, during Ramadan, when native tempers were frayed by fasting, it would be advisable for women in Western dress to stay off the streets altogether. All in all, my husband seemed to have acquired the most delicate sense of the proper thing to do here, expressed largely in terms of what I couldn’t.

  My husband would be back from the university at four, at which time he would take me out for my airing, on foot perhaps for some miles down Pahlevi, peeping like any trippers into coppersmiths’ stalls, saddlers, silversmiths, a few crammed with West German kitsch and electrical appliances (an ice cream freezer once, but never an oven), returning by way of three shops where, bypassing Hassan, we got our daily loaf of bread, bottle of local wine (hopefully labeled Chato-Ikem; wine snobs are everywhere) and clay pot of mast (yogurt). Teahouses abounded on the way, but of course only for males. Or perhaps we might go by droshky to the Blue Mosque, or jog along under the moth-eaten fur rugs to the very outskirts of town to watch the sun go down behind the range of the Elburz, on the other side of which lay Russia. These were not afternoons to be despised.

  But except for Hassan, Bodji, and a student who called one afternoon, I had met no Persians, and beyond the few Europeanized ones to be met at Western parties, was not likely to. The previous week, grabbing even at this straw, I had gone to a reception for our ambassador, only to find that Americans and others had been invited from seven to eight, Iranians from eight to nine. My path was clear: Either I must join up with the “others”—wives of consulate, of missionary, of Point Four, or else I might stay as I was, in purdah, in a harem of one. A concubine, I amended. A harem was at least crowded—with other women. Now they would be interesting to meet. Even Europeanized Iranians sometimes still took a second wife in spite of the practice being frowned on. It was certainly going to be lonely here being the only concubine-wife. Catching myself in this train of thought, I suddenly stood up, put down the Presto pressure-cooker book of recipes, in which I had been looking for yet another way to render meat germless, and went to get my coat. For the good of everyone concerned, it was time I leapt over the wall.

  Hassan had looked at me dubiously as he unlocked our wall door for me. Much taller than most Azerbaijani females, I was able without too much craning to exchange glances with a seven-foot Kurd. My coat; voluminous as any cotton chedur, was like these, hooded, but double-thick woolen does not sit well in the teeth. Below were my shoes, Abercrombie’s desert boots for ladies, but to Middle-Eastern eyes a ringer for the U.S. army-issue for men. And above all were my eyes—two—goggled not for chic but for glare, with lenses aviation-size. As I left, Hassan cast a curious glance at the red pamphlet I was carrying—perhaps a part of our Koran. So I fared forth. Probably no one before me had ever tried to get acquainted there via the Presto pressure-cooker recipe for White Fruit Cake.

  On that first day I had really no trouble. Dried fruits abounded; as for nuts, no Westerner, unless he had grown some in his garden perhaps, has ever tasted any like the Persian ones—the very soul of nut. I knew that stalls selling both were at the bazaar’s entrance. The latter was some distance and I had no sense of direction, but I had only to use my ears, following, above the general hullabaloo of a Persian street, the bazaar’s steady, subterranean roar. Arms full, I returned safely, thanking Allah that we lived near a landmark like the Ark, intoning which phrase I had buttonholed young and old, and once, myopically, a burro. My purchase method had been simple: Point, shriek the scale to stop, extend a hand with an assortment of coins. One or two merchants, literally unable to believe we were not to bargain, would perhaps suffer neurotically from their encounter. Any money transaction draws a participating audience in Persia; life under the spiritual flatness of the prix fixe would be unimaginable. American prestige would go down another notch, but Point Four largesse had already weakened it beyond what I could repair; I was a bit more rueful about the prestige of women. When Hassan let me in, he looked embitteredly at my packages; there was no sentimental question of trust between us, but he had lost his cut. Tomorrow, when he bought our onions and eggs, he would be told the full extent of his loss—and ours. I put away my trophies just in time. “Well,” said my husband, entering, “and what have you been doing with yourself?” This, a query of which he had never been guilty prior to Persia, is a question asked only by a man utterly sure of the reply. As both expected and deserved, he got it. “Oh, mmmmm,” I said. “Nothing.”

  On the second day, according to my recipe, you get lost inside the bazaar. This time I was hunting a container (to hold the batter inside the cooker), about the size of a pound coffee tin, of a metal strong enough to resist ten pounds of pressure for three hours—surely an object easier to pantomime than a cutlet. I had only to find it and point. Pots and pans stalls, however, held nothing small enough that was not as big as a bass drum. The Tabriz bazaar is not an open arcade but a labyrinth. I nosed deeper, peering at chamber pots, poking at silver censers. As I progressed, sellers came forth in droves to harangue me; behind me ran an increasing retinue of the small boys used as runners, holding up everything from mosaics to goatskins, here one trundling up a cauldron to cook a flock of hens in, the next tugging my sleeve to tout a tiara for the cook. Yesterday’s réclame had preceded me; there was a woman loose in the bazaar who would pay the price of a horse for a pomegranate. Meanwhile, I had penetrated to the huge, vaulted core of the place, where the fine rugs were hung in an atmosphere thick as Rembrandt, almost Parke-Bernet: Very hush-hush, no hard sell, no goats. It took me ten minutes and three circuits to realize that I could not seem to leave it. But if one has the recipe, no need to be downhearted. Here came a last urchin, towing a young man. I scarcely had time to hazard what this might mean, when the young man spoke. “Cyrus Shabusteri. Student of English. Son of general.” His lineage, it developed, was better than his English, but somehow I had dropped the word “coffee,” and in a trice we were at a stall that sold it. Only in the bean, but there, next the jar, was my answer—Middle-Eastern answer. Tea of course, a brightly painted round tin canister of it, expressing itself in exotic French as the very best, which I somehow rather doubt because of the picture on it, a heavily embossed one of a girl in a two-part bathing suit, reclining on a beach between two palms—not my idea of a tea-picture. But my thumb tests the girl with satisfaction. Thick tin. Very heavily embossed. Cyrus escorts me all the way back to our door. That day Hassan does not look at me at all.

  After that it is easy; the trick is to be hunting something indescribable and to get lost at it�
��extemporaneously if need be. This is possible even on a street as straight at Pahlevi where, after two days hunt for the “heavy waxed paper” that the canister must be covered with, I see, in an oddlot shop between some binoculars and a jar of Max Factor face cream, a dusty packet of Peek Frean biscuits whose inner wrap will just do. The owner and I, both speaking a little German, have one of those nicely limited chats: He has never been in England; I have never been in Germany—whence comes the natty Opel in which he returns me to koutche Ark. On other days I arrive by various means, often with child guides, once in the well known Rolls of the lady beer-magnate from behind the wall across the way, although the lady herself is not in it at the time. As I get to know Tabriz, it appears that Tabriz, on certain levels, is getting to know me. True, most of my encounters have been at point of purchase, but I am learning enough of the place to know that this is a very Persian point. In fact I feel almost at home here, or about to be. Home is the place where, when you can’t find it, they have to bring you back.

  But there is an end even to fruitcake, and now mine, blended of so much, is done. As I unveil it, the sun has just set behind the Ark; now the blue at the windows is total. The hullabaloo from Pahlevi has the gloaming sound of tea-time anywhere. I find that the girl on the canister has lost the bandanna half of her enameled-on bathing suit, and is now nobly tin above the waist, nobly nude. But the cake is quite perfect, even looks occidental. It is not; it is a Persian one; Alt. 4,500 ft., Temp. Sometimes Steady; Time—three weeks. Ingredients, endless.