Black Light

by Galway Kinnell

  Mullah Torbati walked in the door.

  “Salaam alaikum, Jamshid,” the mullah said. Jamshid’s eyes went at once to the mullah’s henna-stained fingernails. The hand seemed to blur, as if a red beak were about to take shape. He looked back to the mullah’s face.

  “Salaam alaikum, Mullah Torbati,” Jamshid said. A wave of revulsion surged up in him, but he resolved to hold his peace until he was more in control of himself.

  “I have come to speak with you,” the mullah said, “of your daughter.” His voice was high-pitched and rasping, and he spoke with grave, insinuating authority.

  “Ah, my daughter . . .” Jamshid mumbled.

  “You asked me to occupy myself over your daughter, dosh Jamshid.” The mullah called him by the slang for brother used between underworld fraternals. “I, who give myself in the service of God, am asked by a lowly repairer of rugs to find a match for his daughter. Mind you, I accept to do this. But to be truthful I have to tell you it is a difficult case . . . a very difficult case . . .” He paused to let his words seep in. Jamshid began to tremble.

  “Very difficult . . .” the man of God continued. “A case my conscience had, yes, a scruple or two about accepting, a case only my devotion to good works and my friendly feelings toward you, brother Jamshid, finally persuaded me to undertake . . .” Now a placating tone came into the rasp. “A little extra contribution from you to the crippled and the poor . . .” he gestured deprecatingly, “could make all the difference . . . I might then, God willing, locate a candidate, pious, hardworking . . .”

  “Very? . . .” said Jamshid.

  The mullah’s face lit up in a hideous smile. “Eh, brother Jamshid, so you know all about it?” The mullah stepped forward and his smile grew worse. Jamshid stepped back against the table. The sunpatch was absolutely perfect now. On the other side of it the black-robed, pale-headed figure shimmered like a bird. The voice rasped on. Jamshid could hardly make out what it was saying. “Of course you do. Who doesn’t? I myself have tried, naturally, to ignore the ugly stories. Young men, after all, boast and invent, I know that. Nevertheless, nothing makes it harder to marry off a girl than a bit of gossip, even if not one word be true . . .” The mullah’s expression now changed. His voice grew suddenly solicitous. “Ah, dosh, I see I have upset you.” He stepped forward again, his arm extended. The red-beaked hand lit up as it entered the falling sunlight. “Oh, mind you, the case isn’t hopeless, not at all,” Torbati continued, with soothing unction in his tone. “You have me as your friend. I shall not allow them to slander the girl. Why just last night, in the coffee house, I shut up an ignorant dog of a mason . . .”

  The hand opened suddenly as if it had caught fire. Jamshid took up the shears, stepped forward, and drove them with all his force into the mullah’s breast. The mullah staggered, then fell backwards. He fell on his back in the sunpatch, which at once stretched grotesquely out of shape. The shears had gone in up to the hilt, and the handles protruded like a bow-knot tied on the breast bone.

  Jamshid squatted down and looked at the body. He still saw the mullah alive. He saw his head turned to one side, nodding a little, as it did whenever the holy man mouthed sage advice. He could not help seeing the mullah as a little boy lying by the side of a pool. A nightingale was perched on the boy’s breast, singing of the life in paradise. The pool of the man’s blood touched Jamshid’s foot, and he got up with a start. The sunlight had been inching forward and had already started to leave the corpse. He tried to think what he must do. It was clear, he must turn himself in. He felt glad that, unlike the mosque, the police station could be reached without going through the bazaar. In case they wanted to reconstruct the crime, he would, of course, leave everything exactly as it was. He stepped across the corpse, stumbling a little on it, as he went for the door.

  At the door he stopped. Supposing they did not believe him and turned him away with scoffing laughter? He would have to make everything plain. Returning to the body, he took hold of the shears. By opening and shutting them slightly, making little silent snips down in the dead heart, he was able to loosen them. He went out with the shears in his hand. At the turning of the stairs someone was climbing. He saw the face of Akhbar the mason.

  “Salaam alaikum,” said Akhbar. “I have come to present my bill.” Jamshid held out the shears, so as to indicate he could not discuss the bill at this moment. Having just come in from the sunlight, Akhbar did not see well and reaching to shake hands, he touched the shears.

  “What the devil . . .?” he whispered.

  “Now that bill . . .” said Jamshid, momentarily confused. “Oh, yes, for the little oven? A graceful little thing . . . meek . . . a good cook . . .” Akhbar had vanished down the stairs.

  A moment later Jamshid went back into the shop. This time he fetched the black umbrella from the corner and dropped the shears into it. He saw that the pitch of sunlight had slipped almost entirely off the body and was taking on its old geometrical form again. There was something pleasing about that. The body was turning drab.

  Out in the street Jamshid could hear the loudspeaker in some minaret singing the call to prayer. It seemed a piece of good luck that he had to go to the police station, and so did not have to go to these prayers, which now seemed completely pointless. He registered the extra weight of his umbrella. Mullah Torbati, for one, he reflected, would not be at noon prayer either.

  chapter four

  Jamshid walked through the bright sunshine. From time to time he gave a little swing to the umbrella. School had just let out for the lunch hour and there were many children about. As a rule Jamshid did not care for children; he particularly disliked thinking of them in school, which he believed was bad for them. But now he experienced an almost giddy sympathy with these creatures who ran so freely in the sunlight. One little boy had a little girl down and was pummelling her. Jamshid, who another day might have beat them apart, merely looked on. Pretty soon they got to their feet, both of them laughing, and ran off together. They were headed home, he thought, also to surrender.

  As he walked between the mud walls, one brilliantly yellow, one soft brown, he felt he was walking through time. He had often walked down this lane, but now he saw it as the street of his childhood. At the foot of the shaded wall, with treetops lifting over it, he and his childhood friend Varoosh used to toss coins, to see whose coin would land nearest the wall. He saw Varoosh, in a slight crouch, moving his arm back and forth as he aimed his toss, a silver glitter in the crook of his forefinger, turning his head now, in his comic way, to make some amusing remark to his friend about that skinny, guilty-looking man carrying a weighted umbrella through the sunshine.

  Just here was a jube in which he and Varoosh used to sit listening to an old darvish they had befriended recounting his marvelous travels: his adventures among the Zoroastrians on the southern deserts, who feed the corpses of their dead to the birds; his springs and autumns as doctor to the Qashqai tribe during its migrations; nights in the opium gardens of Shiraz, where a poet would recite a ghazzal of Hafez and a nightingale would repeat it in the language of paradise; his days as magic-maker in the Isfahan bazaar; his year as camel driver with the great caravans of the deserts—the delights of the caravanserai, the magical taste of water hauled into the blazing daylight from quanats that ran many miles under the desert; his first glimpse of the ruins at Tahkte Jamshid, seat of the mightiest empire the world has known. . . . And at the urging of Varoosh, who was an Armenian Christian, the darvish also told of the strange, holy people in the Lebanon, which had been the western extreme of his travels.

  Now Jamshid came to a doorway which had a bird of paradise for a knocker. Here he and Varoosh had sat and planned how they would run away and be darvishes themselves. He thought of how he had left his father’s shop early one day and waited for Varoosh at the door of the Mission School. They had set out with a sheet of bread and a flask of curd-water. It was Varoosh’s plan that they would go first to the Lebanon, where the miracle-hungry Christi
ans would welcome these sunburnt, enigmatic travelers from the east. Varoosh told Jamshid about these people, their barbaric marvels—wanderings in the desert, burning bushes, roads opening through the sea, graves from which men arose as from a hotel bed, dying lepers suddenly feeling better, meals made of the Son of God’s flesh, crucifixions in the sky. . . . Even Jamshid began to feel the bloodcurdling thrill.

  He entered the street where the police station was located.

  He remembered that night very clearly, though he had not thought of it for years. Where the desert begins, at the outskirts of the city, they had taken shelter in a half-ruined shrine dedicated to some rich wastrel claiming to have descended from the Prophet. When they broke the bread and poured the curd-water, Varoosh had assumed a tragical look and had said, “Take and eat. This is my flesh. This is my blood.” Jamshid had been frightened and he was thankful it was not his god who was being mocked. He laughed and he ate. Each time he bit into the bread, Varoosh would wince.

  The next morning Varoosh spread himself on the slope of the dome. He lay there slipping and hanging on, and obliged Jamshid to poke him in the side with a stick and to hand him up the flask of curd-water. He took a swig, couldn’t hold on anymore, cried, “It is finished!” and leapt to the ground. Jamshid laughed too, but he was terrified.

  Now he could see the red, white, and green flag slowly flapping over the door of the police station, as if trying to soothe the breeze that agitated it.

  He remembered how cold they had been that morning. He had offered to go back and fetch sheepskin capes, but Varoosh, who had a deeper grasp of things, said it would be unnecessary, since they were returning home anyway to get themselves educated. A true darvish had to be educated, he told Jamshid, otherwise no amount of travels would do him any good.

  Jamshid was not surprised when, a few weeks later, Varoosh’s mother died in childbirth. Several days after the funeral Varoosh’s family moved to Tehran, and Jamshid did not see Varoosh again. When Moharram came round a month later, Jamshid took part for the first time in the flagellation processions. He beat his head with a small flat sword, and made himself bloodier than anyone.

  Jamshid stepped out of the sunlight, and into the darkness of the police station. Nobody was at the desk, so he sat down on the oaken bench. The door and windows were blazing with light. Another door led into a place of greater darkness. Jamshid cleared his throat loudly and coughed. Finally a policeman in a rumpled blue uniform came out. With hardly a glance at Jamshid he installed himself at the desk and began leafing through some papers. Jamshid went over and stood before him. Jamshid could feel the downward tug of the umbrella. The man continued to poke about in his papers. His face, Jamshid observed, was steeped in corruption. What was the good of giving himself up, he reflected, for doubtless the first thing they would do would be to try to make him bribe his way out again.

  “I beg your pardon.” Jamshid felt nervous and the words came out half strangled. “I have something to confess . . .” He stopped. The policeman had not deigned to raise his eyes. “I beg your pardon,” he said, this time more loudly. The policeman glanced up, his pencil poised so as not to lose his place. Jamshid shifted uneasily. He realized suddenly it was no easy thing to confess to a murder.

  “Ah the rug-repairer,” the policeman said, with a tone of contempt, Jamshid felt. “What is it?” He lifted a haunch, grimaced, and farted. “We’ve got no rugs to repair, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “It’s not that,” Jamshid said. “It’s that . . . it’s that . . . I’m afraid . . . I . . .” He paused. How exactly to put it?

  “Afraid, eh?” the policeman broke in. “Yes, it’s a scary world. Holdups, murders, burglaries . . . Everybody’s afraid. But,” he showed his rotted teeth, “it’s not to the police you must come when you’re afraid. It’s to the locksmith. When what you fear actually happens, then you come here. Not before.” Agh! thought Jamshid, take a fool and put a wooly blue uniform on him and he believes he’s the Shah himself, if he’s talking to somebody of no importance. The man had turned back to his papers. Look at him, Jamshid told himself, pretending he can read!

  “It’s not that,” he said, “not that at all.” He was angry, and he was determined to confess no matter what, if only to force this goat to see how close he had come, in his insolence and stupidity, to letting a dangerous murderer slip through his fingers. But there are people for whom the world suspends itself, so as to give them the stage, and others whom it regularly interrupts and silences, and Jamshid was one of the latter kind. He had not failed to notice that if he was lecturing Leyla on her cooking, the doorbell would ring while he was in midsentence, or if he was complaining to a storekeeper, the man’s telephone would cut him off with a rude jangle, or if he was haggling in the bazaar and just reaching, so he thought, an advantageous price, another person would jostle up and for half the price purchase the very item out from under his nose.

  It was no surprise, then, that as he stood poised on the very brink of his confession, two men, cursing loudly and pushing each other, came banging into the station.

  “This one whose father is a dog promised me three tomans . . .” one began. The policeman pushed his papers aside and gave the two men his complete attention.

  “Your father fries somewhere,” retorted the other. “I did not promise you one rial . . .” Jamshid went back to the bench and sat down. It would be some time if ever before that blue-suited oaf would be able to sort out the elements of the dispute. He felt light-headed. Looking through the window he could see the blue, wild shininess of the sky. Swallows were darting crazily through it. He saw the branch of a tree, out of which little leaves were starting to unfurl. He remembered how Varoosh used to criticize him for his timidity, his fear of authority. What would Varoosh be doing now? Had he really gone ahead and become a darvish? Probably. Probably he would have accomplished all the ambitions they had ever talked about. That was Varoosh’s way. Jamshid experienced intense regret. Of all the adventures they had dreamed of, he, Jamshid, had not dared taste even one. He looked at the leaves again. How would it be, he thought, if one of them, even an unimportant one, should wither of its own free will and creep back into the limb?

  He got to his feet, took up the umbrella, and walked to the doorway. On the threshold he paused and looked at the bright sunlight. He stuck his head out and looked down the street. It was empty, except for a little boy who stood in the sunshine looking back at him over his shoulder. In the room behind him the three men were still shouting at each other. Jamshid wavered a moment longer, then stepped out. For the first time in a long while, he was aware of how beautiful was the day.

  chapter five

  At a bakery Jamshid bought a sheet of sang-gak freshly plucked off the hot pebbles. Its warm, rough, fleshy surface felt oddly pleasant. A few doors down he bought a flask of curd-water, and stuffed both curd-water and bread into his umbrella. At the corner he glanced back toward the police station. Nobody stirred. Ahead he glimpsed the same small boy still gazing back over his shoulder.

  After cutting across some fields Jamshid came to the road leading toward the southern desert, the same road he and Varoosh had taken all those years ago. He could see it stretching away, rising in the distance and turning slightly under the great afternoon sky. The city he was leaving was a low layer of greenery and white buildings, out of which rose a few sets of minarets, some blue, some mud-colored, and the golden dome of the shrine. The sun made the dome glitter down one side. There was no help now, Jamshid reflected. He had plunged through. The world was closing up behind him. There was no possibility of turning back. But the feel of the rutted, crumbling surface of the road under his feet made him uneasy.

  Had Akhbar returned to the shop bringing the police? Was that insolent dog at the desk even now suffering the wrath of his superiors ? Or would that retribution have to wait until this evening, after Leyla had begun to worry and had gone looking for him? It occurred to Jamshid that perhaps Leyla would lay out his
dinner, wait awhile, take it in again, eat her own dinner, sit in the garden for an hour or so, and then simply go to bed. He felt annoyed with her. In the morning she might not even notice his absence. The dead body might lie undiscovered indefinitely. He thought of the room where the sunpatch would be dividing, branching, starting to twist up the wall, and of the bloody body on the dark floor, growing muddier, merely a part of the shadows by now, a dark mass.

  He did not feel tired as he walked, even though at precisely this hour, for some twenty years, he had not failed to lie down for his nap. Walking with long strides he felt the pull of muscles across his belly. The warm breaking surface of the road underfoot seemed more friendly now. The air cooled off and a breeze carried away his sweat. He concentrated on his step, and on the feel of gravel and pebbles through the cotton soles of his geevays. He thought of the old shirts and dresses these shoes were made of, worn by unknown men and women, thrown away, collected, torn into strips, the strips folded and hammered and sewn flat to flat, and worn again as these slightly spongy soles through which one could just feel the road’s wrinkled surface.

  He came to the ruined immanzadeh where he and Varoosh had spent the night. It was the same. Perhaps one or two more bricks had fallen off. That was the way. If things took a long time to get built, at least they didn’t fall apart very fast, either. Lying against a heap of old tile fragments and broken bricks, Jamshid looked toward the horizon, pale where the sun had just lifted from it. He watched it vanish. Then he looked up and saw the sky was full of the beating lights of the stars. He looked around him and saw that the familiar things, stones, sands, rubble, had completely disappeared. He felt he was drifting alone out into the wilds of the night.

  He reached into the umbrella for his bread and curd-water. As he did so his hand felt a sharp, stinging sensation, as if he had just been bitten or shocked. He drew the shears out and flung them into the darkness. They clanged on some rocks. He wiped his hand on his trousers, and took out the food. As he ate he seemed to smell the odor of blood.