by Iyer, Pico
She took herself down to a flat open space—once a living room, perhaps—and slipped through the broken arches, bending down to pick up rocks now and then, or peeping out at him and smiling from behind a shrunken red-brick chimney. She loved to gambol through other people’s spaces, it seemed, the actress again, free as long as no one took her for herself.
“Tell me a story,” she said at last, having scoured the site thoroughly and settled down on a line of broken wall, the sun beginning to sink behind them. The wind had come up, as it always does on summer dusks in the hills, and with its bluster came a trace of chill.
The flat open space looked strangely like a tiny open-air stage, made for recitations, and so he went down to it, stood before her, maybe thirty feet away, and said, “There was once an old man, who was young in years, and who lived in the old city of Konya. He was a respected teacher, a father of two, a pillar of the local courts. He led a good and pious life and was famous for the judgments he passed on religious matters.”
The words came easily to him, and from a place he couldn’t name. Learn and master all the rules, Sefadhi had said, and then throw them all away.
“But one day, for the first time ever, without warning, the man of religion found God. It sounds like a dramatic thing—a thunderbolt from the heavens. In fact, it was a very simple thing: he met a stranger who gave him back a sense of who he might be. ‘Who is better?’ the rough traveler, much older than he, called out in the marketplace. ‘The one who studies God or the one who is God?’
“It was a strange question and perhaps a heretical one, and it shocked him so much he became someone a little different from the person who’d woken up and left the house that morning. Someone, in fact, who thought only of his duties, his students, the case of the moment.”
She was looking down at him happily—glad, he realized, just to be in this unlikely site with the sun setting and nothing else around. All the struggle and paleness was gone from her now: as if a storm had passed and she had come into a clearing.
“And then, as suddenly as the stranger had come, this new friend disappeared. The old man wept; he walked and walked to see if he could find him. He sang songs, wrote poems, even, when he heard the new friend might be in Damascus, sent his son there to bring him back.
“But then”—and here, to his pleasure and surprise, the story took hold of him, and he left everything real behind—“as seasons passed, it became clear that his friend was never coming back. That his purpose, in some sense, had been served. And so, picking up an old leather bag from beside his bed, he walked out of the house, out of the town, and up into the hills.
“The town of Konya is surrounded by mountains, and in winter they grow cold, impassable. Travelers stay in the inns till spring, and everyone waits for the first sign of wild flowers. But this man went in the opposite direction, climbing up the mountains in winter as if determined that no one could follow him.
“Days passed, his wife and children looked everywhere, but of course they could not find him. Neighbors muttered that they had been ‘abandoned,’ but his wife knew that in some sense her husband was just going home. He was not lost, she thought, but found, and now was on his way to a place as distant as the place where he had been born. Though shopkeepers searched all the places where he was known to sit and drink and talk, they never found him, and his wife never helped them in their search. ‘He is not there,’ she said, ‘because the person you know is dead.’ ”
The wind picked up now, blowing her long hair into squalls and tangles round her face. She pushed away the strands that flew into her mouth, and he raised his voice to be heard over the whistle and the roar, his words filling and echoing around the abandoned space.
“The police sent horses and dogs, the best climbers in the town traveled as far as they could, children were told to look out for a ragged man where they played, but it was all, of course, in vain. He was beyond their calls now, and it was easy to believe that words were among the things he’d left at home.
“In time the search was stopped, and families returned to their usual rounds. His students became teachers, with schools of their own; his children became parents. One day, many years later, a traveler came down from the mountains, in February, when the snow was thickest, with a curious tale. He was a bedraggled man, of twigs and branches, and he said something rough and strange about a young old man, seen many years before, beating a trail into the mountains, to somewhere from which you could see valleys and distant lakes. Without saying a word, he had followed the man to a rock at the end of the last trail, where the path ran out, and seen him arrive at the ruins of what must once have been a large house. There was someone waiting for him there, as if they had planned to meet all along, and as soon as he saw the wanderer arrive, to be found by the stranger, he, the man who spoke to them now, turned round and came back out into the world.”
A silence fell, broken only by the wind, the flapping of her hair against her cheeks and shoulders, the sound of his steps scrambling back to where she sat.
“That’s beautiful. Where does it come from?”
“Here,” he said, tapping his chest.
“Dangerous, too.”
“I suppose it is. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that.”
“I don’t think everyone would be so happy about his abandoning his wife and family.”
“I know. It must have come out of one of the texts I’ve been reading. You know how you read a story—about a pavilion in the desert, say—and then you dream about it, only better?”
She was holding on to her hair as it streamed about her face; the sky was on the edge of navy blue, and the first stars seemed imminent.
“We should be heading back. You must be cold.”
She shook her head no. “I like it here. It’s free.”
An unexpected word to use, but he sat beside her on the rock, leaving her free to explore some more.
“A long way from Los Angeles,” he said, somewhat obviously, as if words were less dangerous than silence.
She nodded and turned to him, expectant. In most people it is the eyes that tell you who they are; in her, the small pursed mouth, strangely prim and shy.
“Well, I’m heading back even if you aren’t.” He pulled himself up and began walking along the path: the afternoon was taking strange turns along the road, and he’d found himself in a place he’d never expected to visit. He held on to the thought of the Rumi story as if to prevent himself from losing balance.
She followed him as he walked, and when they arrived back at the car there were stars in the branches above them. The road was close to pitch-black, and it was easy to imagine that not a single car had driven past in all the time they’d been walking. Their own car looked touchingly brave and resolute, alone under the tree full of stars.
He unlocked her door, and closed it behind her, and when he got in at his side, he moved into a waiting silence. He didn’t want to intrude on it—her quietness pulled him in as much as her chattering pushed him away—and he put on the heater and sat behind the wheel, waiting till she returned from wherever she was.
“Thank you for a lovely walk.”
“My pleasure.” Such observation of ceremonial courtesies in anything-goes California.
Then, after a few moments, “Do I get another kiss?”
“I don’t think so. I’m taken, remember?”
“And not with me.”
“It wouldn’t be fair—in the circumstances.”
“ ‘In the circumstances,’ ” she said, mocking the pompousness, and leaning forward to kiss him lightly on the lips.
She kissed, somehow, as if she’d never kissed before: suddenly the girl who listened to the songs of travel was in the tiny car beside him. It was strange to see all this just from the way she said, “You’re so warm,” and rested her head on his shoulder, but he could feel somehow the weight of all the things she hadn’t done or thought, saving them up for a rainy day that might never come. She was li
ke someone whose life had not begun.
“Thank you,” she said. “You really touch me.”
“I’m glad.”
The words could hardly have been more inadequate.
“I could get in trouble with you, big trouble.” The very girlishness of the phrasing making her point better than she could.
“You’re lonely,” he said, not knowing why exactly.
“In a way. As much as anyone. Like you, I bet.” She turned to look away from him, out the window. “All the time I was growing up, I never seemed to belong. My parents were outsiders everywhere we went.”
He didn’t say anything, to leave her where she was.
When she turned back to him, her eyes were full.
“I’m sorry,” he said, smoothing the fall of hair behind her ears. “I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind. As long as you make them better.”
The strange, antique diction again, the sense of her removal from the world, and then, as if pushing aside what was fragile in her, she climbed over the gearstick—a tomboy on her way into the hills again—and sat in his lap. Her long hair, golden where it fell around her face, highlighted the hurt eyes.
“Eaargh,” he said, looking up at her.
“What is it?”
“I’m starting to like you more and more.”
“Somehow, I thought you would.”
She looked down again to kiss him lightly, and he thought of how California did this to you: suddenly the rules were changed, and you had something fragile in your arms, and you weren’t sure what to do with the weight of it.
“You grew up in an area like this?” he said, to retrieve his bearings.
“Except I was alone.”
“Not in your home.”
“Especially in my home. As soon as I opened my eyes.”
He kissed her quickly for consolation, and then reached for the gearstick, so she’d return to her side and he could start up the car and drive back into town. Whatever would come after this would only smudge what had come before.
The engine spluttered and juddered, and failed.
“The heater, it’s killed your battery.”
He got out into the angry wind—rising while they’d been in the car—and she climbed out of her side, and they were alone in a howling whirl, the lights of the town far below. Above, there were so many stars the road was bright, in ghostly light, and so they began walking, towards more dead brush and empty hills. A few minutes later, the wind roaring, and the trees shuddering and bending in the dark, they came to a house, built on a turn, a house of spirits, as it seemed, with a rusty old pickup and a VW parked in the dust beside it, and no lights on inside.
“Anybody home?” she called out. “Hello?”
There was no one, and they walked on, brought together at the point where they’d been planning to pull apart. Farther down the road, there was another house, built on a ledge, a ship waiting to take off towards the distant lights, and as they drew close to it, a pickup truck pulled out. They went up to it, explained the situation, and soon were riding in the back, the stars above them through the trees, absurdly like two orphans lost at camp.
“Usually,” she said, holding her arms around herself in the wind, “I mean often, I get freaked out just to be this close. But with you I’m safe, because you’re taken.”
“I hope so,” he said, as if picking up the habit of uncertainty from her.
When the truck dropped them off at a small illuminated phone booth, sitting implausibly in a parking lot in the middle of the mountains, a shuttered country store beside it, and a broken piano outside the door, he called the emergency rescue service, and was told to stay where he was, they’d be there in fifty minutes.
“Lost in the mountains like the guy in your story.”
“Except he was alone.”
“Not at the end,” she said, a mischievous light in her eyes. “What if they never find us?”
“They probably won’t. All I could tell them was, ‘We’re in the abandoned parking lot somewhere near the top of the Pass.’ ”
He picked out a simple prelude on the piano, and she sat down beside him, kissing his neck, blowing on his lobe, the cusp of his ear, as he played. He looked over at her, and her eyes were thrilled, awakened.
When the tow truck came, a short bull-necked man, not delighted to be called out into the hills at eleven o’clock on a windy Saturday night, asked him to sign, and then drove them, his truck laboring, back to the tree full of stars.
When he dropped her off at her car outside Follow Your Heart, no words came to mind.
“Thank you for a wonderful day,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, recalling that his story had ended strangely.
The next day, when he came home from the library, there was a message on his machine. “Hi,” said the now familiar voice, curiously flushed, full up. “I hope you won’t get mad at me, though probably you will and won’t ever want to see me again. But I just wanted to thank you for a lovely day. I don’t have so many of those in my life.”
The abrupt lurch into something else, and the sadness she carried round with her like a coat. “You may think you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life, but I wrote you a poem. Here goes: please don’t laugh.
“We climb and climb,
And from the peaks we see
A space I might have called
Eternity.
The day winds down,
The skies unravel wide,
And where we are
Is somewhere deep inside
A home that never was,
A place that has no name:
Stillness in the dusk,
No face inside the frame.
“I don’t know what it means,” said the soft voice again, “but I think I was inspired by our walk. Our walks. If you never want to talk to me again, I’ll understand. Take care.”
“Mr. Macmillan.” It was Alex’s voice now, feigning distance. “I couldn’t observe you in the house last night. Were you unavoidably detained?” (It was Sefadhi’s euphemism for students who failed to show up for seminars.) “I know your Sufis are a jealous mistress.”
He played the message over again, and listened to her odd poem: as much Emily Dickinson as the Beach Boys, he thought, and not at all the simpler kind of lyric he’d expected.
He picked up the phone to thank her—it had been a long time since anyone had written a poem for him, let alone dared to read it into his machine—and then he remembered he didn’t have her number. He could call Kristina, of course, but that felt like a violation of trust somehow. Besides, Kristina seemed involved with everything else in his life, Khalil and Sefadhi and the men calling from Westwood.
The only thing to do was wait. By the phone if necessary, with this new life set to one side of the desk beside the ancient poets.
He got up early on the twenty-eighth, and drove through Santa Barbara to the south. There were campers, boogie-boarders, German sightseers along the coastal highway, and on the strip south of Oxnard there was still an air of happy improvisation, as if no one had really settled down there yet and the beach still belonged to rock and sea. A few hardy souls were camping out in tents beside the waves, and occasionally figures would emerge from the beach down below and walk along the road, swathed in black, or bare-chested, as if they were characters from the Chumash caves. The impulse, always in California, backwards, away from established forms, towards whatever is primeval.
Now, besides, as he pulled into Los Angeles, all the ancient cultures of the world were streaming into the bright, forgetful city, bringing their runes, their songs and superstitions. There were more Druze here than in Lebanon, it was said; more Zoroastrians than in Iran. When he turned off Wilshire and drove towards Olympic, he found himself in what could have been a suq, selling homesick dreams; “Mexanesian” restaurants under palm trees, and Spanish pawn shops with their signs in Hangul script. So many differe
nt cultures crowded into the small space beside the desert that it looked as if the wind would blow and all of them would be scattered again, to the far corners of the earth.
On Westwood itself, the numbers went down slowly, past a long, half-broken line of places selling passports, immigration advice, dusty deserted restaurants offering what was billed as “Royal Persian Cuisine.” From the windows of the stores old torch singers, from a generation ago, and a world away, looked back at him; pictures of the central mosque in Isfahan, amidst guitars and children’s baubles. Old men sat on the sidewalk with their Farsi newspapers, sugar cubes set beside their glasses of tea, and on one side street an ancient man, in faded jacket and tie, was helping his wife across the road, her head scarf, her blond hair, the expensive leather bag she carried all speaking of other lives, far away, in the shadow of the ChampsÉlysées.
The place marked 9763 looked hardly different from its neighbors, and when he went in, it was to be greeted by the smell of scented cardamom tea and only a few men in the aisles, browsing through magazines and books. The characters of Farsi rose and broke around him like waves in a foreign desert. Behind the counter, a man in a greying ponytail was conducting an argument on a phone—or just a Farsi conversation—and one or two of the men, some in suits, one even in dark glasses, looked up to see who had come to join them.
“Can I help you?” said the man from behind the counter, suddenly by his side, and looking piqued.
“I’m John Macmillan. I have an appointment with the owner.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“I think so. His son’s the one who told me to come here.”
The man looked back at him in open disbelief, and then began walking towards the back of the store with the rolling gait of a wrestler. When they’d got halfway there, another man, well tailored, came to take the stranger over.
“Mr. Macmillan. Thank you for your time. It’s good of you to visit us.” The smooth voice from the phone, all Belgravia polish.
The newcomer muttered something quickly to the ponytailed cashier, and the man went back heavily to his post.
