Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  “My father’s waiting for you,” said the smooth young man.

  They walked back through the narrow aisles to a small office in the rear where a man in a jacket and tie—a professor in an earlier life, perhaps—was paging through a large book. When they came in, he looked up from what he was doing, and the young man went over to stand by his side, as if to serve as a translator.

  “My father wanted you to see this.”

  The old man opened the desk in front of him, and pulled out a large May Company box, about the size of a formal shirt. Then he extended it across the desk to the visitor.

  He was meant to open it up, he guessed, and when he did so, he had to stop himself from saying anything. It was beautiful, so beautiful he wanted to take it away and lock it up inside his desk forever. It felt like the reason he’d begun studying these distant poets all those years ago, love song and prayer all at once.

  The cover itself, clearly old, was heavy and green, with gold calligraphy across it, not far from the imperial style; when he opened it up, very carefully—the owners’ eyes on him at every moment—it was to see poems written on every page, great swirls of racing dots and dashes, as urgently from the heart as if they were verses from the Quran (they weren’t, his Farsi told him). Along the margins of each page were golden arabesques, as if to keep the meanings hidden, or safe. He thought, for no reason he could fathom, of the golden bars on the shrine in Damascus, the weeping women at its grille.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, aware that they were watching for his reaction. It didn’t matter what he said, he realized; the purpose of the summons was to see how he responded to the book.

  “We thought you might be interested in it,” said the silky young man, who seemed accustomed to acting as an intermediary.

  “Interested, of course. I’d give anything to have this in my possession. Even for a few weeks. But I’m not a collector. You understand that?” As long as you can’t tell someone’s motives, you’re always a few steps behind him.

  “We know that. We also know that you are a scholar. You have spent years with Javad Sefadhi. You’ve been to Syria.”

  He looked back at them to try to gauge what was going on. Clearly, they were testing him in some way, toying with him; he remembered how, with Khalil, he’d gone in with questions of his own and come out with the professor’s errands.

  “I hardly have enough money to buy my own textbooks.”

  The young man said something quick and rough to the older man, under his breath, and then looked back at him with a smile.

  “If I had a chance to spend some weeks with this, a month or two, I could tell you something. But I’m not sure I have the time or”—he might as well speak their language—“you have the money. Anyway, there are a million people who know more about this kind of thing. Even in Los Angeles.”

  “They are not pure,” the man said simply. “They know too much.”

  “Not poor, either. I’m sorry: I don’t know what to say. It’s beautiful, and in the right hands it could give someone a lot of pleasure.” He’d keep things on the aesthetic level. “That’s all I can say.”

  It was not an easy thing to put the book down: holding it even for a moment had felt like walking into a private room where something you’ve been looking for indefinitely awaits you. To have the prospect of new verses in his hands, to see them in a context that no one known to him had seen before—the scholar is a materialist in a different vein. He put it down, and looked to see what would follow.

  “We are grateful for your time,” said his urbane host, “very grateful,” as another, still younger man came in with a tray on which had been placed three glasses of tea. “Maybe, if you are interested later, if you know someone who is interested, you can come back. You have our address.”

  He took the glass he was given, uncertain about why they were performing the formalities after the discussion, not before, and sipped. “How did you find me?” he asked. “I’m not the most obvious person to consult in such a situation.” Men who spoke like characters from a second-rate thriller, an actress on a mountaintop at midnight: it wasn’t so much that California lacked mystery, he thought, as that it wrapped it in the forms we know too well from movies.

  The young man didn’t say anything immediately, but opened a thin black leather wallet and pulled out a card, heavy and embossed. “It means a lot to us that you are interested in our culture.” Then he led him back towards the door. “We are grateful, deeply grateful, for your interest.” Thanking him for what he hadn’t done—as, he realized with a start, Camilla often did.

  Out in the street, abruptly exiled from the mystery, he felt at odds, restless and defeated: two hundred miles just to be caught inside one of the diaspora’s intricate designs. He looked at his watch—it was still early—and he thought of Camilla, hiding out somewhere inside the grey sprawl. She’d taken care, he’d noticed, never to tell him anything about the specifics of her life—where she lived, what phone number would reach her, what she did with what seemed to be her free time. But he’d caught sight of an address, on the top right-hand corner of her address book, when she’d pulled it out to write down his telephone number, and even if it led to a parent’s house or just a place where she’d once lived, it could only bring him closer to a sense of who she was.

  He drove across the tangle of freeways in the angry, hazy morning, the streets a snarl of competing dreams, the roads themselves an emblem of what happens when everyone is free to pursue his hope, and they all fly off in different directions. The place gave newcomers a blank piece of paper on which they could sketch anything they wanted; but would the newcomers ever give the place something more solid to hold on to than a sheaf of decorated papers?

  When he got off the freeway running south, closer now to the hills—he could smell orange blossom in the streets, and the mountains were just visible through the smog—he drove slowly down the road he’d mapped out in advance, a long, disinherited street of fast-food stores and gas stations, the occasional astrologer’s shack offering futures at $25 off. Now and then, at intersections, a church spire poked forlornly through the trees, mocked in some ways by the small, colored buildings on every side.

  When he turned off the main street onto the road whose name he’d seen on her book, he found himself in the kind of California backstreet he’d imagined in the Chandler books he’d read at school— a long row of low-slung Spanish houses, their curtains drawn against the world. The number he was looking for was painted in black on the sidewalk, but when he went up to the front door and rang the bell, there was no answer. He couldn’t even tell if it had rung. Walking around the house, he imagined her in her bedroom, crying out for help and then barricading herself in behind locked doors and closed windows in case anyone actually came and responded to her call.

  On the far side of the building from the road, he could just make out the grubby backs of curtains, cigarette stains on the carpet, and a mess of papers everywhere; beside the front door, a few wet bills and letters stuck damply out of a tiny mailbox. He walked through the garage on the other side, and came to a small garden, wild and overgrown, and behind one of the plate-glass windows, the curtains left a small space open. Peering in, he saw a wilderness of boxes, papers everywhere, plants, stuffed animals, old letters, a dress, a calendar from three years before. Everywhere he could see, a mess of objects once treasured, all thrown together so wildly you couldn’t tell what was important and what was not (part of the point, no doubt). A stranger looking in would have said that a thief had been through the place; he imagined that the thief was her, throwing everything together so as to hide what it was she cared about.

  “It’s weird,” she’d said suddenly, just before he dropped her off at her car after the long night on the mountain. “I’d really begun to think you were someone I could get seriously hung up on.” The tense she’d used, the sudden rescinding of trust, the pulling away when minutes before she’d been clambering towards him—it all seemed a way of
saying that she would always hide from what she liked.

  Above the mess on the floor, he could just make out—not easily, through a dirty window, in the midday glare—a framed picture on the wall: a painting of an English house, he imagined, or a Renaissance madonna. He looked closer, trying to decipher it, and saw, or thought he saw, a painting, Near Eastern in origin, of a tiger, framed in black and golden lines: the kind of thing a caliph might amuse himself with on an idle afternoon.

  “I’m sorry I missed you,” he wrote on a scrap of notebook paper as he walked back to the front door. “I only wanted to say hello.” Then, getting in the car to drive home, he realized that he was further from knowing anything than when the day began.

  The morning in the Iranian shop had left him at a distance from himself, as if the life he was officially leading were taking place in a language he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t tell what impulse exactly had been awakened by the manuscript, sensual or professional or romantic, but it hardly seemed to matter: the Iranians, as no doubt they had intended, had set something ticking in his life, and now he could settle to nothing else.

  “The thing you’ve got to bear in mind”—Mowbray, after being asked for a letter of reference for the fellowship—“is that everything in that tradition has a different value since the Revolution.”

  “Meaning I should be careful?”

  “No more than any scholar is careful.”

  It was his professor’s habitual warning, but underneath the note of caution lay something more particular: ever since the clerics had come to power in Iran, both the outer value of Islamic texts, and the inner, had been suddenly transformed. Manuscripts were streaming out into the West now at a faster rate than ever before, on their way to auction houses and private collections; but, more than that, something that was sacred, even esoteric, to those within the faith was being sent to people who saw it only in financial terms. And every time a book of poems was sent to Christie’s, say, or sold off to some museum, something whose only real meaning was spiritual was being treated as just another objet d’art, or valuable antiquity. As if a price tag were to be hung around the neck of a saint.

  Khomeini himself was remembered in many quarters as a latter-day Hafez, the “Defining Modern Mystic,” as Pauline Davis had called him in the title of her dissertation: people spoke of how he lived in Qom in the early days, in a tiny room, surviving on rice and yogurt, and devoting his nights to writing love poems and to studies of the Gnostic scriptures. During the day, he would sit with his students on the floor and speak of the sufferings of the oppressed. When he spoke of God—Pauline had said this in her seminar—you could feel the fire of love burning through him.

  But as soon as he came to power, like any leader, he’d begun to fear his own shadow more than anything. And any group that met under cover after nightfall, mystical or otherwise, could be seen only as a threat to the regime. The rulers of Iran would never take after Sanai or Saadi, two of their strongest attractions to the West (just as the Southern Baptists seldom bothered to attack Shakespeare, even if they did find him immoral); but any manuscript not authorized by them—and offering a different reading of the faith—could only be seen as a subversion. Especially if it came forth from someone outside the faith.

  It was dark when he got back from the library, and when he opened the door—locking it behind him—the only thing visible in the room was the furious blinking of the red light on the answering machine. He pushed a button, and a voice came out that sounded as if it was very far away. “Hi . . .” He couldn’t make out all the words that followed (she was in the desert, he guessed, her voice drowned out by passing eighteen-wheelers). “. . . just got your message. I’m sorry I missed you. Miss you, I guess . . . to Monterey this weekend. Any chance you might be free . . . It’s 818-437-2962.”

  “Just” got his message? And driving up to a town three hundred miles from her own? In England people take you by surprise the longer you know them, and only slowly, often after many years, could you begin to make out the hidden staircases and false fronts behind which they conceal their treasures; here the surprises came all at once, and even the surfaces were variable.

  He waited till it was a reasonable hour the next morning—she liked to roam at night, she’d said—and forced himself not to go out to the library, not even to take his morning run along the beach. When the clock on the desk said 10:00, he dialed the number she’d left for him.

  “Hello,” said the voice at the other end. It was groggy, and very male.

  “Hello. I’d like to leave a message for Camilla Jensen.”

  “She’s right here. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Why not?”

  In a matter of seconds—too few for comfort—she was there, intimate as ever, inches from his ear.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “You can disturb me anytime.” Femmes fatales, he guessed, were not part of her onstage repertoire.

  “Anyway, I got your message . . .”

  “Are you free? Can we meet?”

  “Perhaps for a short while. I’ve got a paper to complete.”

  “I’m driving north on Tuesday.”

  “Then why don’t you come to dinner? I’m at 4657 Del Playa. You just get off the freeway at Los Carneros, and then drive towards the ocean. When you can’t drive any farther, turn left.”

  “I’ll be there,” she said, and then there was a scuffling—the sound of whispers—and she returned to whatever was at her side.

  “So when do I get to meet this woman you’re not seeing?”

  It was Monday evening—their usual time for darts—and Alex was picking up his implements from the counter near the table.

  “In time. It’ll happen.”

  Alex fired his darts—one, two, three—into the board, all elegant economy, and then turned to sip at his drink. “Is it something you think I’ll see or something you think I’ll say?”

  “Neither. It’s just that she’s not at her best in public.”

  “The private treasure,” said Alex in his characteristic way, and made room for him to take his turn.

  His first throw landed in the outer ring.

  “The Sufis don’t tell you to live in your own head.”

  “I realize that,” he said, and his second dart banged against the board and fell limply to the floor. “It’s just that I don’t have time for distractions with the thesis due next June.”

  “So you keep yourself hidden, and tell yourself you’ve got mystery in your life.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  His third throw scored a paltry 7.

  Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Shia faith,” he found himself writing the next afternoon, determined to put all thoughts of manuscripts, and unsought friends, behind him, “is the principle of taqiyya, or sacred dissimulation. This notion, of sanctioned lying, is all that allowed the Shia to keep going when the Soviets converted the mosques of Central Asia into ‘Museums of Atheism,’ and all that allowed the Sufis to keep a flame alight when Atatürk turned Turkey into a secular state, banning the dervish orders that are now the country’s most famous export to the world.

  “There are, of course, many practical, and political, reasons for the principle of hiding what you truly feel, especially in a culture like Iran, where secrecy has always been a kind of second nature (‘Conceal your goal, your destination, and your creed,’ as the old maxim has it). But deeper than this, the principle of taqiyya stands for something more: it tells us that we’re all other—better—than we seem.

  “Indeed, as Ryan McCarthy has written, in defining religious discourse as that which covers its own tracks, leaving a trail only for initiates, it is a way of drawing a curtain—best of all, an invisible curtain—between those who are inside the circle and those who are not. To feign ignorance, as Peter did, in denying Jesus, is in fact . . .” and then the alarm clock that he’d put at the side of the desk went off, and he came back to his senses: three-fift
een Tuesday afternoon. She’d be getting in her car to start the long drive up here.

  He walked out into the bleached sunshine, and untethered his bike from where he always kept it, by the wall. Then, going into the center of town, he went to the record store that had been his sanctuary when he’d arrived, and rummaged through the “Super Oldies” section at the back. At the supermarket he bought a jug of mango juice, and a bottle of wine like the one he’d seen at the sister’s house, the first afternoon. Then, going home to tidy up, he put a copy of Rumi on the bedside table, and stopped to wonder what it was exactly he was doing.

  He timed the spaghetti so it would be ready for eight o’clock, and give them a little time to enjoy the beach while it was light. He set the Songs of the South Pacific he’d just bought at the second track, with the PAUSE button depressed. He put the books he’d been packing for Seville away so she wouldn’t be reminded of his coming departure. Friendship is in every case an acceptance of someone in all her mess and folly, he thought, but in this case, he had to take extra care to step around all the things she was keeping away from him: the house with all its clutter, the unexplained male voice at the other end, the stuff she threw behind her in the car as if it would all sort itself out in her absence. It was as if she feared the clearer person inside her.

  At seven-fifteen, the phone rang, and, startled, he ran across to it, and answered softly, almost intimately.

  “Mr. Macmillan.” Alex, smooth as a late-night deejay. “Bertolucci’s Conformist at Campbell Hall. Tonight at eight o’clock.”

  “I’m sorry. I have something else.”

  “Of course you do.” Alex rearranged his pride. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  He went back to the sofa, and sat there at a loss, not sure exactly why he was waiting for someone who contrived to put him off in some way. It was as if she had a light, a fire inside her, and shied away from it by living in the smaller self she presented to the world. In most people you feel that they’re showing their best face to the public, and keeping their shadows carefully hidden; in her it was almost the opposite.