by Don DeLillo
Ashes.
In the painted evening they walk past the windmill. He points out to sea, about a hundred yards, to the place where dolphins breached, a week ago, in a softfall of violet light. It is one of those imprinted moments, part of him now, contained in island time. A fishing boat approaches in the calm that settles in at this hour. It is blood red, the Katerina, a life ring fixed to the mast. She smiles as he makes out the name. The motor leaves a cadenced noise.
The small Cretan rugs. The plank floors. The old lamp with its sepia shade. The donkey bag on the wall. The flowers in rusty cans on the roof, the steps, the window ledges. Tap’s handprint on a mirror. The cane chair in a rectangle of light.
In the morning they leave. From the top deck of the boat they see the white village rocking in the mist. How brave and affecting it is, houses clustered on a windy rock, news and reassurance. They eat the food she has packed, sitting low in their slatted bench, out of the wind. He asks her the names of things, ship parts, equipment, and later they walk across the lower deck to trace the system of ropes and anchor chains.
The sun is obscured in dense ascending cloud. Soon the island is a silhouette, a conjecture or mood of light, scant and pale on the iron sea.
THE MOUNTAIN
6
The aircraft veered into position, halting. We waited for clearance. I looked out the window, trying to find something that might distract me from the meditative panic I always experience, the dream-rush before takeoff, all the week’s measures of self-awareness in one charged moment. The pale sand stretched level in the distance. A figure was out there, a man in a flax robe. I watched him walk into nothing. Erased in chemical flame. The plane moved down the runway and I sat back, rigid, looking straight ahead.
Words sounded incomplete to me. The starts and stops in people’s voices came unexpectedly. I couldn’t figure out the rhythm. But the writing flowed, of course. It seemed to have a movement top to bottom as well as right to left. lf Greek or Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain. I saw writing everywhere, the cursive beaded slant in tile, tapestry, brass and wood, in faience mosaics and on the white veils of women crowded in a horse-drawn cart. I looked up to see words turning corners, arranged geometrically on mud-brick walls, knotted and mazed, stuccoed, painted, inlaid, climbing gateways and minarets.
I sat across the aisle from a dead man on a Yemen Airways flight from San’a to Dhahran. He died about fifteen minutes into the flight and the people traveling with him started wailing. They carried cloth-covered bundles and wailed. A man behind me remarked to his companion, “But credit extension isn’t the issue here.” I gripped the arm rests and looked straight ahead. We were over the Empty Quarter.
I found myself studying doors, shutters, mosque lamps, carpets. Surfaces were dense and abstract. Where figural things were present they were rendered as nuances of line or curve, taken out of nature to the level of perfect repetition. Even writing was design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation. I didn’t know the names of things.
Forty men and women in immaculate white robes with close-fitting head-scarves filled the rear section of the plane, a Tunis Air flight, Cairo-Damascus. The women’s hands were covered with small red marks, designs of some kind. At first I thought they were letters of the alphabet. Not that I knew which alphabet. Possibly the obscure language of some religious sect. Finally I decided the figures were crosses, although some might have been chevrons and others might have been variations of either of these. I couldn’t tell whether the marks were ingrained or simply applied to the surface of the skin with cosmetic dye. The people had been on the plane when I boarded, all quietly in place, waiting. After we landed I looked back that way as I moved up the aisle toward the nose exit. They were still in their seats.
Women’s eyes glanced away, windows were false, shadows crossed the wall in dappled patterns, architectural planes receded, prayer niches were aligned with Mecca. This last fact supplied an axis to the vapor of fleeting shapes. So much that happened seemed to happen simultaneously. Animals everywhere. The cramped passages of the souk were the least secret places. Loud voices, hanging meat. The crowd was soft, however, floating in robes, sandaled, billowing, touched by the light that fell through broken places in the roof.
I stood waiting at the baggage conveyor in the airport in Amman. The king would be arriving later that afternoon after seventeen days abroad. When the king returns to Jordan after a trip abroad, two camels and a bull are slaughtered at the airport. The drive to the palace follows.
I was staying at the Inter-Con, which was near the palace and across the street from the U.S. embassy, a not uncommon Mideast cluster. I took the oversized map I’d bought in the lobby and spread it across the bed. There they were, as Owen had said, the anagrammatic place-names. Zarqa and Azraq. Between them, west of the midway point, the hilltop fortress of inscribed stones. Qasr Hallabat.
It didn’t mean anything. I’d only thought of checking the map for these places on my way up in the elevator. They were a curiosity, that was all. But I was interested to find that he hadn’t invented them.
Volterra wore a battered field jacket. Paramilitary drab had always been his color, I realized. He had about two weeks’ growth on his face and looked crafty and drawn. We embraced silently. He looked at me, nodding, his biblical gesture of friend ship and memory and elapsed time. Then we went into the restaurant.
It was an Indian place, empty except for us and two boys, the waiters, who took our orders and then stood motionless at the end of the long dark narrow room. We sat in tall chairs and talked about Kathryn. It was she who’d given him my number in Athens. When I told him I expected to be in Amman in three weeks’ time he said he would try to meet me there. He was calling from Aqaba.
“I thought you had a traveling companion, Frank.”
“She’s in the room watching TV.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Small place near the fourth circle. You’ve been to Amman?”
“First time.”
“Transit cranes,” he said. “Beeping taxi horns.”
“You’ve spent all this time in Aqaba?”
“On and off. It’s our base. We make three-day trips into the Wadi Rum with a guide and a Land-Rover. We camp out, in our fashion. Then we go back to Aqaba to water-ski.”
“I don’t see you on water-skis.”
“That’s an abbreviation. ‘Water-ski.’ It’s shorthand. It means everything in the world that doesn’t involve looking for a bunch crazy people in a barren waste with a guide whose true purpose is to lead us in circles.”
“Why are you looking for them?”
Frank laughed. “Is this an interview?”
The boys pushed a large and elaborate serving table along the carpeted floor. On it were two cans of beer.
“Owen seemed to think the cult struck a romantic chord somewhere deep in your breast.”
“When you put it that way, Jim, I don’t think I’m obliged to discuss the matter further, friends or not.”
“I take it back.”
He poured the beer into his glass, watching me.
“I’m looking for something outside the range of expectations, you know? It’s just a probe. The Wadi Rum’s been filmed before, wide screen, soaring music. The place intrigues me in a totally different way. It has to be linked to this homicidal calculation. These small figures in the landscape. Brademas says these people are stalkers. They pick a victim and they watch. They wait for something. There’s a particular logic.”
“You’ve walked away from three or four projects, Kathryn told me.”
“They were safe,” he said.
Something came into his eyes, a cold light I recognized as the contempt he often summoned to respond to challenges. “They weren’t worth sticking with. They were exercises. I found myself getting interested in things because they presented a familiar theme or subject I thought I could handle differently, I thought l could give a sweet tw
ist to. Genre crap. I was trying to force these ideas to deliver up riches they didn’t contain.”
His mood softened, one word to the next.
“I’ve been feeling the pressure. I admit it. People alighting in helicopters. CIapped-out producers. Lawyer-agents in Nazi sunglasses. They come down out of the sky. Nobody likes the way I work. I don’t talk to anybody. I ban people from the set. Do you know what a dumb little napoleonic thing that is? But I do it. I like to do things in secret. I don’t say a word to people who want to write about me. Two good films, made money. It happens I like doing deals. Today we do deals. You don’t have to pretend money is dirty. Or a deal memo is too complicated for your sensibility. It’s a Jewish science, movie-dealing, like psychoanalysis. Only what’s the connection?”
“I don’t know.”
“Intimacy. They involve intimate exchanges. The point is I was starting to hear things. I was reading things about myself, hearing footsteps. I was the man who walks off his own set, the man who closes down productions. I started getting the feeling that my downfall was being plotted in the major capitals of the world. Volterra’s time had come, you know? They weren’t even going to extend me the courtesy of a finished disaster. I was wasting away above the line. Let’s cordon off the area and watch him die in relative privacy.”
“What have you come across out there?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot. First the desert patrol knows what I’m about. They don’t like me sticking my head in every black tent in the area, asking questions. Second my guide is no help at all. Salim. He sees himself as a Swiss banker. Terrifically discreet and guarded. ‘One does not speak of these things.’ ‘I cannot ask these people such a question.’ Then there’s Del, the traveling companion. She calls the Arabs rag-heads. Another big help. But there’s something going on. These Bedouins talk to Salim, I see something passing between them that doesn’t get translated. There’s a rest station at a place called Ras en-Naqab. We went in there once on our way back to Aqaba. The place is on a hill and the wind comes out of the desert like a jet exhaust. Del wasn’t with us that trip and Salim made right for the toilet, so I go in alone. There’s only one person in the place, a white man. At first I figured he was Circassian. He’s huddled over his food, eating with his fingers, right hand only, dressed in layers of loose shirts and tunics, bareheaded. I sit down, take a closer look at the guy, say to myself this guy is European. So I address him. I ask some harmless question. He says something to me in Arabic. I keep talking to him, he keeps eating. I went to get Salim that useless bastard to translate. When we got back the man was gone.”
“A sighting?
“I think I made a sighting.”
“Do Circassians speak Arabic?”
“I asked Salim. Yes. But I still think I made a sighting.”
“Are you sure it was Arabic you heard?”
“First you interview me. Then you make an interrogation out of it.”
“What do you do now?”
“Brademas gave me a name at the Department of Antiquities. When we first got to Amman I went there. This is a very soft-spoken, very cultured man. Dr. Malik. He’s working with a Dutch team that’s surveying sites right outside the city. He tried to discourage me. All I could get from him was the general area where the murder took place.”
I said, “It stands to reason they’d move on after killing someone.”
“Brademas told me they stayed. They’re somewhere in the Rum.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“They changed locations but they’re still there, he said. Dr. Malik told him they’d been spotted. But he wouldn’t tell me that. I went to see him again this morning, soon as we arrived. He told me if I really want to learn something about the cult I have to go to Jerusalem. ‘You must ask for Vosdanik,’ he said.”
Volterra liked to show skepticism by tilting his head to cast sidelong glances at the figure opposite him. Now he described his talk at the Department of Antiquities, repeating the aggrieved and disbelieving looks he’d communicated to Dr. Malik.
He was told to go to the old city, the Armenian quarter. He must ask for Vosdanik. This man has three names, four names. Vosdanik is apparently the first name of one of these three or four full names. He is a guide in the old city. This was the absolute limit of Dr. Malik’s knowledge.
Frank liked doing accents.
He asked Dr. Malik to give him some names here in Jordan. He didn’t want to go to Jerusalem. He didn’t want to get involved with another guide. He was told Vosdanik knew about the cult. He would be easy to find. He was Armenian. He lived in the Armenian quarter. Frank asked for more information on the Wadi Rum. There’d been a murder, after all. More than one in fact. Dr. Malik said, “It is best we do not speak of these things.”
Volterra let his gesturing hand drop out of the air. The boys brought our food, then stood in the dimness at the end of the room. No one else came in.
“I can’t surrender myself to places,” Frank said. “I’m always separate. I’m always working at myself. I never understood the lure of fabulous places. Or the idea of losing yourself in a place. The desert down there is stunning at times. Shapes and tones. But I could never be affected by it in a deeply personal way, I could never see it as an aspect of myself or vice versa. I need it for something, I want it as a frame and a background. I can’t see myself letting it overwhelm me. I would never give myself up to the place or to any other place. I’m the place. I guess that’s the reason. I’m the only place I need.”
He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I traveled between places, never in them.
Rowser had sent me out to these jurisdictions to perform various good works, to fill in here, do a review there, restructure some offices, see to sagging morale. It was a season of small promise. Our Iranian control was dead, shot by two men in the street. Our associate for Syria-Iraq was sending cryptic telexes from Cyprus. Kabul was tense. Ankara lacked home heating, families were moving to hotels. Throughout Turkey people could not vote unless they had their fingers dyed. This was to keep them from voting more than once. Our associate for the Emirates woke up to find a corpse in his garden. The Emirates were overbanked. Egypt had religious tensions. Foreign executives in Libya were coming home from the office to find their houses occupied by workers. It was the winter the hostages were taken in Tehran and Rowser put the entire region on duplicate. This meant all records had to be copied and sent to Athens. One of our vice-presidents, visiting Beirut, came out of his hotel to find his car being disassembled by militiamen. I opened an office in North Yemen.
Frank ordered two more beers. We talked about Kathryn. When we finished dinner we wandered around for an hour. Taxis followed us, beeping. We were in a residential area, empty, no one else on foot. A man in uniform came out of the darkness and said something we didn’t understand. Another figure appeared twenty yards along the sidewalk, holding an automatic rifle. The first man pointed across the street. We were to continue our walk over there.
“Something tells me we’ve come upon the palace,” Frank said. “The king is at home.”
It took two days to get permits for the trip to Jerusalem. When we reached the Jordanian security area, Volterra and our driver took all the documents inside. I learned against a post under the corrugated roof, watching Del Nearing blow on the lenses of her sunglasses and wipe them in circular motions with a soft cloth.
“There’s an Arabic letter called jim,” she said.
“What does it look like?”
“Don’t recall. I gave the language about an hour’s study.”
“It could be important,” I said. “It could tell me everything I need to know.”
She looked up, smiling, a slight figure with a finely drawn face, her dark hair short and slicked back. She’d spent the fifty-minute drive ministering to herself, catching up on the precautions travelers take against the environment. The coating of hands. The moistening
of face and neck. The delicate release of eye drops from a squat bottle. She went about these tasks apart from them, deep in thought. She gave the impression she was always behind schedule, accustomed to doing things in layers. These moments of sealed-in physical busyness were meant mainly to be spent in reflection.
“I have a disembodied feeling about this whole trip,” she said. “I’ve been floating, like. I didn’t know we were going to Jerusalem until we got into the taxi and went to pick you up. I thought we were going to the airport. He claims he told me last night. l don’t use drugs anymore. Frank helped me with that. But l am disembodied, regardless. I miss my apartment, my cat. I never thought I’d miss my apartment. That must be where my body is.”
Volterra came out.
“Look at her. Those oversized glasses. With her thin face and that short hair. All wrong. She looks like a science-fiction insect.”
“Suck a rock, Jojo.”
We got on a bus with a group of Baptists from Louisiana and rode across the river to the Israeli compound. Elaborate procedures. Del came out of the booth where women were searched and joined us at passport control, scanning the area.
“Look how they lean on those M-16s. I thought they’d be different from the Arabs and Turks. They’re sloppy-looking, aren’t they? And they wave those guns around, they don’t care who’s standing in front of them. I don’t know what I expected. Neater people.”
