Many boats accompanied Iskandar’s expedition out of the harbor and into the deeper waters of the bay. On deck, priests of various faiths gave him their blessings. He entered the submersible and signaled for it to be lowered. Half sunk in the water, it stopped. Iskandar looked up to see why. We’re just checking the rope ties one more time, Aristotle yelled. None of the words could penetrate the diving bell. Iskandar searched the expressions of his men, peering down over the prow of the ship. Their faces were smudged through the shaped glass, their mouths and noses growing fat and small, their white teeth giant, so it seemed that they were in turns ecstatic and glum. Everything was hazy above the line of the water, while the world beneath burbled into dark focus. Completing their checks, his men let the bell plunge below.
Iskandar marveled at how underwater, sunlight seemed to shatter in fragments across the surface. Fish darted under his feet. He never expected the water to be so green, for the ragged sun to slice through in beams. The sight reminded him of his childhood when, as a pupil imprisoned in the library, he would watch dust motes drift in and out of the light.
It grew darker the lower he sank. The arc of his vision narrowed. A cloud of stingrays skimmed alongside him, circling for an instant. He pressed his nose to the glass and watched them beat their wings and swim away—Like great pillows of flatbread plucked from the tandoor, he thought, I must remember to describe them to the illuminators. He spoke aloud and the words echoed within the diving bell. It occurred to him then that he was alone, and that he could not remember the last time he had been so alone. There was always somebody nearby, a servant, an advisor, a woman, pairs of ears and eyes to affirm the things he said and did.
The submersible kept falling. This far down, the sun above was more distinct and restricted in its effect. Iskandar could just about see the barnacled shadows of his ships and the lines of their anchors. So many people choose solitude, Iskandar thought, hermits, wanderers, saints … if they can endure it for years, surely I can handle it for just a little while. Seaweed smoked to the surface in tendrils. An eel snapped against the glass and looked Iskandar in the eye.
There were thousands of stories about the mysteries of the ocean, of the cities mermen built from coral, islands sprouting from the back hair of leviathans, the treasure of King Solomon’s shipwrecks. Iskandar hoped for the grace of a fleet of turtles. But as he dropped further down, the immensity of the sea resolved around him. The murk conjured little interruptions of life—a group of jellyfish unfurled like the caps of mushrooms—that only reminded Iskandar of the small range of his wonder. I will have to do this many, many more times, he thought, just to feel that I’ve done it at all.
The submersible hit the bottom, rolling a bit so that Iskandar pitched from side to side. It came to a rest on the edge of a ridge. Enough sunlight reached here. He had always imagined the sea floor to be a flat plain, as even and endless as the ocean itself. Instead, he looked out on complicated topography, seaweed forests clambering up a hill, rivers of coral pouring through the neck of a valley. Porcelain crabs strolled along the glass. A harem of blue-head wrasse poked out of their coral apartments before disappearing back indoors. Clownfish nuzzled the fronds of an anemone.
At a slightly lower elevation, at the far end of what was visible to him, he saw lines protruding from the floor. There was something suspiciously human in those shapes, the curve of a hull, the splintering of a mast. He decided to get closer. Iskandar pushed against one side of the submersible. It fell, dropping off the tiny cliff, smashing coral and raising a mist of sand. Iskandar rolled over and over.
When the submersible stopped rolling, Iskandar found himself separated only by the glass from the moldering remains of a whale. Dizzy, he lifted himself to his knees. Starfish sprawled in the whale’s empty eye socket. The creature was so large that parts of it were in different stages of decomposition. Lampreys sucked on the flesh of its haunches. Its flippers had crumbled away, revealing long fingering bones that dug into the ground. Sea creatures of every shape and texture, worms and mollusks, fish and eels, crowded like refugees in the whale’s caverns. All that survived of its mouth were ranks of pointed teeth and the pale cudgel of a jaw.
Pity overwhelmed Iskandar. It pained him to see such a grand being reduced this way, denied the privacy of death, becoming home to a ghoulish society of scroungers. Iskandar swayed. His dull image appeared in the glass, refracted in the irregular turns and bubbles, so that a million visions of his face ghosted in front of him. We have to save this whale, he thought, it deserves a better memorial than this. He pulled the rope that rung the alarm up above.
Soon, his men reeled in the submersible. Iskandar watched the rotting edifice of the whale recede, felt the submersible rotate as it spun up to the light, teetering in a rain of marine snow, each vegetal flake glowing. When the diving bell breached the surface, Iskandar hid his eyes from the sun. His men levered the submersible on board and popped him free.
I have to go back down, he said once he had recovered his breath. Don’t be foolish, Aristotle said, that’s enough heroism for the day. I found something … a shipwreck of sorts, and I want it brought to the surface. Why? Iskandar grabbed Aristotle’s hand. Because greatness doesn’t deserve this ignominy of the sea. Fine, but you’re in no shape to go yourself. I suppose not, Iskandar conceded, send an engineer to see how it can be done.
An engineer was placed in the submersible. He was told to estimate the length of rope needed to secure the corpse. The vessel was winched overboard. Iskandar prayed for the engineer as he disappeared below the water. Only minutes later, the bells rang and the cables shivered. Bring him back up, Aristotle yelled. The men heaved and pulled. Eventually, the diving bell returned to the surface. It had broken cleanly at the middle. Its other half, including its passenger, had fallen away. Iskandar lay down in his cabin. He imagined the poor engineer sinking to the bottom, lying forever folded in the whale.
THE FALL OF AN EYELASH
Forough left her country when she was still a college student. Her family smuggled her away at night without letting her tell any friends. She kissed her young brother, tucked him into bed, and watched him fall asleep like it was any other night before a morning of tooth-brushing and tea. Her parents sent her over the desert with jewelry sewed into the linings of her clothes. She carried a silk carpet so fine you could fold it to the size of a bib. It alone paid for much of her journey. The smugglers admired her carpet, turning it back and forth in the light and praising its deft weave, as if they could sell rugs as easily as they hurtled people into new lives.
After crossing many borders, she arrived at her refuge. The country that took her in was green and made from clean lines. Most people were kind to Forough, but kindness is sometimes easier to give than to receive. They found the story of her voyage so courageous that they insisted she tell it over and over again. This exhausted her and offered further proof, as if she needed it, that while an exile can escape her country, she can never escape her exile.
It didn’t help that her work made her think at all times of her homeland. She studied and then taught the medieval poetry of her country. There was something unsettling in the sight of a blonde student reciting with perfect meter and inflection a seven-hundred-year-old verse in her language. But why should I be unnerved, she thought, this poetry of love is not just for my people … it’s for everybody.
Lonely, she allowed herself to love men in her new country. Several filled her years in college and then graduate school. Thanks to them, she broadened the range of the freedoms and sufferings of her solitary life. She eventually settled on Jonas. He was slightly balding and had thin lips, but he loved her deeply. He cooked, buzzed about her with jokes and curiosities, and didn’t make her miss her family any more than she already did.
Her family blessed the wedding from afar. It was dangerous for them to speak to her, so messages had to be sent indirectly. Through an acquaintance in a nearby town—a distant relative, really—she learned that her pare
nts and brother had feasted in her honor. For his part, her relative brought the newlyweds an enormous box of kebabs and rice. They ate and toasted the future with schnapps. When her relative left, she refused to open the windows for days, letting the smell of the meat linger.
* * *
As both a refugee and a wife, Forough learned new customs. One of them had to do with wishes. Every time Jonas spotted a stray eyelash on her face, he would rush to place it on the tip of a finger. A wish, he’d say, any wish. Then he’d make her blow it off. If for whatever reason she failed—sometimes still damp after a shower, the rogue eyelash clung more desperately to the skin—he would laugh and make her keep blowing until the eyelash vanished. See, it’s gone … the fates will never deny you, he’d promise her.
Forough, who was a quick study, didn’t believe him. A resilient eyelash was as good as a curse, or whatever was the opposite of a wish. She dreaded those moments when he’d make her wish on an eyelash. There was, after all, only one wish inside her, one overwhelming desire whose fulfillment seemed so improbable that it could hardly rest on an eyelash. Her family remained far away, her country was still closed to her. She saw no prospect of reunion and no reason for its hope. Why mock the unbridgeable distance between her and them? And why drain, with every unanswered wish, what little magic there was in the fall of an eyelash?
So she began wishing for small things. A good breakfast. Students who did their reading. An orgasm. Occasionally, she wished for a victory for Djurgårdens, Jonas’s favorite football team. More often than not, these little wishes came true. Jonas would come home on a Saturday, red-cheeked and burping from the beer, and spin her around in triumph. Be grateful, she’d say to him, my eyelash scored your goals.
One day in the shower together, Jonas found an eyelash that had slid into the lee of her nose. Make a wish, he said. Forough held him close and contemplated the eyelash on his outstretched finger. No obvious wish came to her. In this sedate country she was becoming increasingly sedate herself, untroubled by life’s little infelicities. Djurgårdens had won its games this season, sex with Jonas was pleasing, her students were sharper than she expected. She cleared her head. I wish to see my brother soon, she thought. She blew with the force of a thousand wishes. The eyelash, though still damp, disappeared from Jonas’s finger.
The next day the house phone rang. It was her relative. Peace be upon you, he said. And you, she replied. Your parents transmitted a message through my family, he told her, they feared it would be intercepted otherwise. This is what it says:
We are sending your brother over the desert route … He’ll cross the border by the end of the week and then make his way to you … God bless you both.
Forough was so shaken that she offered her relative a cup of tea, as if he were standing right in front of her.
* * *
Jonas helped set up consultations with asylum seekers’ networks and a meeting with government officials. They assured Forough that once her brother arrived, his application for asylum would be expedited. He would receive the same benefits she had received. Her new country would become his, too.
The furniture in their living room had to be rearranged. She bought a sofa bed, ingenious little storage units disguised as footstools, a small TV so that he could watch what he pleased, like he was used to at home. Jonas left a Djurgårdens scarf folded on the sofa, ready for her brother’s arrival. Unable to sleep at night, Forough sat in the dim living room longing for her brother to fill it with his snores. She remembered the loneliness of the desert crossing, the menacing moon. She imagined him bundled in the back of a jeep, watching the dunes slouch away.
In the shower the next morning, she pulled Jonas’s face close. Her fingers searched its every bump and slope. But she was disappointed. After drying her hair and putting it up, she turned to him. Do you see one? she asked. See what? An eyelash, do you see a stray eyelash? Jonas moved her face in and out of the light and shook his head.
Forough’s quest for an eyelash consumed her. In between classes, she’d stand before the mirror in the washroom for minutes, alternately looking up close and at a distance. No fallen eyelash revealed itself. She thought she found one—spotting a hair on the crest of the cheekbone—only to realize that it was too thick and blunt. It had descended from an eyebrow. She pondered for a moment the metaphysical qualities of brow hairs, those shingles of the eye, and decided that they would not do as substitutes. When being gracious, people in her country would sometimes say, Please, walk on my eyelashes. Nobody ever invited you to walk on their eyebrows.
Jonas understood the urgency of her search, obliging her with frequent scans that yielded nothing. His own face offered few wishes. Now more than ever, Forough resented the stubbornness of his eyelashes, which were short and fair to the point of being invisible, with none of her dark abundance. He was sorry for their austerity, blinking over and over again in attempts to make an eyelash drop.
With no lash falling from their eyelids, Forough remembered all the times she had blown an eyelash away indifferently. She had grown accustomed to making little wishes casually, without thinking: wishes for a cloudless sky, for ripe tomatoes, for a worthy councilor to win a local election, for publication in an academic journal, for the mastery of foreign languages, for a glimpse of the northern lights, for flatbread and cheese and mint and walnuts. What a waste, she thought. Her brother was about to reach the border. The breadth of a single vanished eyelash might be enough to push him across. But when she needed it most, her eyes refused to surrender a single wish.
The night before her brother was due to cross, Jonas volunteered to pull out one of her eyelashes. She gasped. Are you crazy? What kind of idea is that? He shrugged optimistically. An eyelash is an eyelash, no? She shook her head and smiled. Only if the eyelash fell on its own upon the cheek would it have any power. To force a wish would be to violate the natural order of wishes. They laughed at themselves and Jonas held her against his chest, kissing the top of her head. He felt an unspeakable guilt for bringing his wife into a tradition that might betray her.
Without waking her husband, Forough climbed out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom. She found a pair of tweezers and brought them close to her eyes. The steel hovered over her vision like a fighter jet. She thought of her brother alone on his journey, clutching all his papers to his chest, the letters and documents and proofs of being that at once imprisoned him and promised him a future with her. The tweezers pinched down and an eyelash soon lay on her palm. She blew it away.
* * *
A few days later, her relative rang. The smugglers had delivered her brother successfully across the border, but he’d disappeared since. An intermediary had been missed, a hostel not checked into, a flight skipped. Somewhere along the shadowy paths of his journey into exile, her brother had fallen away. Where is he? she asked in desperation. Does anybody know how to find him? Is he alive? Her relative had no answers. He promised to make what inquiries he could and to be in touch with any updates as he received them.
She sobbed, something she had rarely done in her life. Jonas came to comfort her, but she pushed him away. The tears spilled down her face. She tried to distract herself from her misery by thinking of the heroines of the poetry of her homeland, those willowy princesses bursting with such epic sadness that they could turn a desert to mud with their tears. If she could, she would flood the world and drown the injustice of its borders. When she was calmer she went to the bathroom to clean herself up. There on her face, glistening in the dry bed of her anguish, was a single eyelash.
LETTERS HOME
1
The pharaoh Necko was not content to rule the Upper and the Lower. He wanted knowledge of the whole. So he plopped a crew of Phoenicians down in the Red Sea and told them to go home the long way. Off they went south, pulling on oars and cursing with lemon breath their bad luck for being alive in the time of the Egyptians.
The edges of an entire continent watched the tentacle cree
p of Phoenician oars. On board, the Phoenicians didn’t see Africa as Africa. They had no sense of its contiguity. At the Cape of Good Hope, they thought they had crested the world. Mount Cameroon belched the fiery promise of its ending. The Gambia River spread wide as a sea. Finally rounding Bojador after several attempts, the Phoenicians welcomed the green of the northern ocean. They relished its cold tirades. If man was made for land, the Phoenicians were made for wind.
For much of their journey, they were puzzled to find the sun hovering on their right side. We would say now, reasonably, that this was the effect of crossing hemispheres, of leaving the north for the south. But they did not have this illusory sense of up and down. The world hadn’t been distorted into place by maps. Instead, they followed the unbroken line of coast, willing it like sunrise to arc into the circle of their longing.
Every few months, they stopped for a while. They found a nameless harbor, beached their boat, scraped the hull clean, undid all the rigging, patched the lonely sail. They stretched out to sleep in little cotton camps. If, by chance, they met with locals, it was quick and rough. The Phoenicians left little behind, certainly not their names. Sometimes, when searching for traces of the vanished foreigners, locals would come across inexplicable plots of alfalfa, growing wild and alien.
Eventually, the Phoenicians skimmed past the Pillars of Hercules into the Mediterranean. The crew was chapped and blackened, dressed in new clothes, furnished with new slaves, drunk on gourds of palm liquor. When they pulled into the harbor at the mouth of the Nile, the Egyptians gathered to marvel at their menagerie of captured animals.
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