by Iyer, Pico
He tried and tried to bring his mind back to the matter at hand— his paper next week at the graduate seminar—but a part of him was far away, and restless, the character in the fairy tale told, on no account, to look behind the last door on the second floor (and so unable to think of anything else). “The first line of Rumi’s Mathnawi,” he wrote now, but almost automatically, most of his mind in the maze-like streets of Old Damascus, “describes the cry of the flute, pining for the reed bed from which it was plucked. The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.”
Outside his window, the surfers at the point were riding the waves, masters of all they surveyed for a moment, and then abruptly vanishing from view, until they emerged again, in a scramble of pale limbs and bobbing boards, their bodies washed towards the shore like so many pieces of laughing debris.
“For the Sufis,” he went on, trying to push himself back to the paper in front of him, “the heart of life is mystery: everything we don’t know. We are even mysterious to ourselves, they believe: a part of us going through the rituals of our daily life, while another part, a deeper part, cries out for whatever it is that can take us back. The stranger whose voice we recognize as our own.”
He stopped again, and got up to stretch his limbs. It was the whole point of the exercise, in a way: to learn to keep yourself out of what has been the consuming passion of your life. The scholar is trained to give himself over to a piece of paper, a riddle—an ancient crux—for years at a time, and told in the same breath to keep his feelings to himself: it is a training in living in the shadows.
He went out into the street now—anything to be free of the paper—and watched the usual dawdle of shirtless boys cycling past, and girls with ponytails flopping against their backs as they jogged. In his mailbox, for the first time in several days, a letter was visible through the slot, and when he pulled it out he saw a pale-blue envelope, Hafez Assad glowering in two colors from the right-hand corner.
Inside—he tore it open as he walked back into the room—was just a single thin piece of paper, the faded black seal of the Institute of Religious Studies in Damascus at the top. The short message looked like it had been tapped out on a manual typewriter almost as old as its owner:
Dr. Macmillan:
Javad tells me I was inexcusably rude when we met. I apologize. We have lost the habit of courtesy in my country. Conversation is something we fear—there is nothing good that can come of it. However, if I cannot help you in your researches, I recommend to you Professor Espinoza in Cádiz. He has spent many years tracing the flight of alleged manuscripts from our poets. I further recommend you make no mention of this to Javad. He and Professor Espinoza do not see the same way on many things.
I hope this begins to make up for my lack of hospitality before.
Your obedient servant in God,
Adnan Khalil
He felt a quickening inside him, as when a door swings slowly open and you see a shiver of light behind it. He saw the old man in his dark room, the framed prints on his shelves, the dusty books inside the case. He heard the man speaking in code everywhere he went, the only safety he knew, no doubt, in the company of his poems. Then he reached for his address book, to write the new contact down—and realized, fumbling in the pocket where he always kept it, that it was gone. Since the trip to the Middle East—or had it started before?—he’d seemed to mislay everything he cared about.
When he dialed the number on the card—he’d had to go back to his suitcase again and sift through the row of books to retrieve it—a woman’s voice came briskly on, and announced, “This is 964-3271. Please leave a message at the tone.”
“I’m really sorry to bother you again,” he began. “You won’t believe this—” And then, suddenly, she was there, like someone who’d been waiting for him.
“Hi.”
“Hi. I really apologize, you’re not going to believe it—”
“I know. I’ve got it here.”
“You found it?”
“You left it on the counter. I found it as soon as you left. But I didn’t know how to find you, so I was waiting for your call. It looks like your whole life is in here.”
“I think it is. Is there some time I could come by and collect it?”
“Name your time.”
When he pulled up to the small blue house a few hours later—he noticed with relief that the car was in the driveway this time—he heard her calling, “Over here. By the side.” When he arrived at the door through which she’d let him in before, she turned over whatever she’d been reading, as if anxious lest he see the title.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am. If I’d lost this . . .”
“I know. You’d have lost everything.” She got up and handed over the small address book.
“Well, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”
“I’m not doing anything. Are you?”
“Well, I’ve barged in on you twice in a few days, and . . .”
“That’s fine. But you must be busy.” She looked up at him and he saw, suddenly, someone with nowhere to go, living in somebody else’s house and collecting the presents that people brought from faroff countries for Miss Jensen (“No: the other Miss Jensen”).
“I’ve got something I have to do this evening.”
“Good,” she said, “so do I,” though he felt, with a pang, that it wasn’t true: she didn’t have anything to do anytime soon.
“Would you like to go for a drive?” she went on in her vague way. “It looks really pretty out today.”
“Sure. Why not?” He’d told himself, on coming to America, that he’d try to learn to be more open; the West was the land of unexplored horizons.
“Just give me a minute,” she said, and he found himself alone at the half-closed door, waiting and waiting (she hadn’t invited him in, he noticed), while Martine came into his mind again: suddenly, after all this time, she was everywhere. “It’s almost as if you’re hiding out behind your life.” The Cloisters on a winter morning, their breath making ghostly circles in the air. “The poems, the strict routine, the books on your desk—it’s all a way of keeping yourself away from what you really feel.”
“That’s why I’m going to America,” he’d said, and she’d looked back at him as if he’d truly disappointed her, by closing the wrong door. Now, at last—it had been a long wait—the door before him opened, and the young woman came out, transformed: in a long white dress, with a dab of blusher to brighten up her cheeks, her hair let down to frame her frightened eyes. He thought, inexplicably, of the time a student had asked him for an appointment, to discuss her paper, and when she’d opened her diary, he’d noticed that all the pages were white, unclaimed.
“So—where would you like to go?” he said, not sure of what the protocol for this demanded.
“Anywhere would be great. Can we go up to the mountains?”
It was a surprising request—the mountains were so close, she could get there in ten minutes—but he looked again at her lumbering car, ill-suited, perhaps, to such ascents, and then opened his door for her, and drove along the foothills to the north. When they turned right onto the Pass, they began to climb the road that eventually cuts across the mountains and down into the valley beyond.
“When I was in England,” she was saying as they rose, and he heard a blur of parties at Magdalen and lectures on Gertrude Bell, the time she’d gone to Paris to see some Ottoman prints, the class she’d taken on women on the Silk Road. It was as if she were playing a role, and one that she had calculated would play well with him, and yet one that made no sense in the context of her life. “I guess that’s why England was such a liberation,” she said, as the town began to fall away behind them, and they climbed and climbed, the hills below them dry and bare. At the top of the Pass, where it begins to descend towards the inland valley, he turned right, along th
e “Road of the Heavens,” which twists and snakes along the top of the range all the way to Montecito in the south, and suddenly, as so often here, the weather turned, and they were in clouds so thick they could hardly see a few feet ahead of them.
“You never know what it’s going to be like here,” he said. “Like two different countries, almost.”
“We’ve risen so high, so fast.” She peered out into the fast-moving mist as if happy to be somewhere murky again, in the presence of chill. “It wasn’t just testosterone, and people talking about their résumés,” she went on, and he remembered that she was in the middle of explaining England to him. “It was as if people knew where they were going.”
The trees were very close to them now, on both sides of the narrow road, and in the fog they seemed closer still, the only shapes they could make out in the grey, the only tokens of something real. The world had lost dimension here, and order, and even though he put on his lights, they could still see nothing but mist, an imminence of rain. Every slow turn and mountain curve bringing some new shifting prospect.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it would be like this.”
“I’m not. It’s amazing. Romantic. Mysterious.”
As they edged along the road, they found themselves navigating between great boulders on the hill above, and sudden, plunging falls to the other side. Occasionally, through the clouds, the city showed up, shining, with the sea a rich blue behind, and the islands in the distance. Then the clouds would be everywhere again, and they would be alone with great stone markers, the outline of hillside brush. Here and there they could see a house above, someone’s expensive dream constructed in the mist.
“This reminds me of the stories I used to read when I was a child,” she said. “About transformation and magic doors and people who went through these hidden doors and came upon a hidden world.”
“This was in L.A.?”
“Yes. But I imagined it was somewhere else.”
As she spoke, looking for what would connect them, and reaching out, in her way—he remembered how she’d invited him in for juice— he began to prepare a small speech in his head: “Look, you’re really sweet and charming, and I’m sure you have plenty of admirers, but I’m afraid . . .”
He was about to deliver the speech, but she was chattering on about her time in France and how she’d seen a cloud that made her think of being inside a whale, as if some instinct in her told her to keep talking, and to keep his speech at bay, and how she’d once played the lead in a local production of Shadowlands, the story of C. S. Lewis. The sense of imminence was everywhere: the clouds portending rain, the little lecture building up in his head, the hopes that she’d brought on even this brief drive, in her white dress, and makeup that sharpened blue-grey eyes.
“Look,” suddenly she cried, and again his talk was lost. “Can we go and explore?”
It was a pile of bricks in the outline of a room up above them, just faintly visible through the clouds, like an eerie relic of something else. More new lives being constructed on this fragile slope.
“I love abandoned houses. You can make them anything you want to.” And just behind the bright voice, some quality of wistfulness, as if she were trying to push down whatever it was she felt.
“I’m not sure it’s abandoned. It looks like it’s being built.” But already she was scrambling up the slope, unexpectedly nimble, holding her dress by the hem and moving as fast as if she were going off to one of the places she’d read about.
At the top, when they came to the house-to-be, she picked up a stone, a piece of brick, and looked around her at the emptiness. “I guess there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
“I think so.” He looked around for the place at which to deliver his sentences—he’d formed them perfectly by now—and then, unexpectedly, a face peeped out, out of the mist, and then another: two yellow-haired kids playing hide-and-seek around the corners of the unfinished house.
“This is ours,” said the little boy firmly. “Daddy says this is going to be my playroom.”
The little girl looked on in reverence.
“This is our home. Who are you?”
“We’re just exploring,” she said softly, not shy about putting herself down on their level.
“What’s your name?”
“Camilla.”
“What a funny name! I’m Skye and she”—he pointed to what was apparently his sister—“she’s Cloud.”
“Then it’s your day,” said Camilla, bending down so she wouldn’t be above the two of them. “A day of beautiful clouds. You must be the queen.”
The little girl beamed, glad to be on equal footing, and the boy ran off, upset, perhaps, to be no longer the center of attention, and she gave herself over to exploring the joinings of the brick with the girl. Crunchings, scramblings from the clouds told them the boy was not far away. It was as if a whole veil, of wariness and distrust, had fallen away from her, and when she stood up, smoothing her dress, her face was flushed with bright color, light.
“I think we should probably be leaving them to their games,” he said. “We don’t want to trespass on their dream.”
She scrambled down the slope in front of him, and he came after, trying not to fall, the words ready in his mind, and the first few specklings of rain prickling the windshield. When he started the car, she said, “Look,” and as the mist receded, giving way to rain, they saw other houses, in no set pattern, all around the hills, the slopes blackened in parts, from a recent fire, and the houses the reborn hopes of people who had lost everything they owned.
“I’m so happy here,” she said, a girl again after her game. “I’ve wanted to come here ever since I moved into Krissie’s house.”
He didn’t ask why she hadn’t, and as he prepared his opening lines—“You’re really nice . . .”—she said, “Tell me about you. I’ve been going on and on about myself. What about you?”
“Not much to tell.”
“You’re studying Rumi and Islam at the university. Why did you choose them?”
“I don’t know,” he said, searching for the right distance. “I suppose they’re everything we didn’t learn about in school.”
“Have you spent much time in the Middle East?”
“Not a lot. Enough. You?”
“I never go anywhere. But my sister, Krissie, travels. That’s how I know about the Sufis.”
They had almost come to Montecito now, and the houses had become more extravagant, Palladian villas, great country mansions set behind gates, all the many dreams people had brought and placed on the Pacific’s doorstep. As they descended, they drove into late sunlight, and because the day was darkening now, and he remembered he’d concocted an appointment in the evening, he said, “Is there anywhere you’d like to go?”
“Wherever you like the most,” she said, and he flinched at the unsought intimacy.
“The beach.” There’d be just enough time for him to deliver his regrets.
He parked by the chains on the dead-end road—the signs saying “Stop” and “No Trespassing” at every point, reminding them of the security companies shadowing their every move—and they went down the concrete ramp that leads onto the sand. The sun was off to one side now, and sinking fast, and the last few surfers were trudging up towards the road, wet dogs shaking themselves dry beside them.
When she stepped onto the beach, she took off her shoes and ran towards the sea, and again he was disarmed, as if he were keeping two people company at once: the heedless girl who, when she remembered where she was, put on a mask of knowingness. She brought him a shell where he sat on a rock, as if they were the kids they’d seen on the hill, and said, “Tell me about your studies. What’s the single best thing about them?”
“They make me believe, and they tell me of mystery.”
He hadn’t expected that; he hadn’t expected anything. Clearly, he was tired and the day had gone on a long time.
“Thank you. That’s beautiful.” She loo
ked up at him with an expectant glow.
One of the first things he’d learned when he arrived in California was that everything was different in the pacing: he would be walking through a prologue while those around him were running towards Act IV. Everything changed fast here, like the weather in the hills, and people reached for things with the terror of souls not sure they’d ever see the chance again.
“What is it? You look shy.”
He was piecing the words together again, as the light faded, and the occasional faces that passed turned gold.
“Nothing.”
“It must be something.” She put her hands in front of her, in a pantomime of good behavior, and leaned forward: she stared at him beseechingly, teasingly, as if to prize out from him a boyhood secret.
“No, the thing is . . .”
“What?” she said, coaxingly.
“I’m taken.” He looked away from her expectant eyes, her glowing face, and realized that the words had come out wrong.
“You are? You’re taken with me?”
“No. I mean, you’re very charming and sweet, and I wish things were different . . .” Out at sea the lights were coming on around the oil derricks, so the far-off structures glowed like Christmas trees. The sky took on a rich dark blue, and looking out in this light, with few signs of the developed world, you could imagine yourself in some other place of navy shades and desert spaces.
“I mean, in different circumstances, I’m sure, but the thing is, I’m claimed.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“I think it was.”
She sat back.
“I appreciate it. No. Really. Thank you for telling me. It makes things a lot easier.”
