by Iyer, Pico
In the morning, when he forced himself to the library, she was sleeping. Stretched out, even when he returned in late afternoon, in a happy state of trust. She never slept easily at home, she’d said the night before, the conversation drifting on till dawn, and the two of them, without seeming to intend it, moving from the sofa to the bed. Yet sometimes all she wanted to do was sleep and sleep so she’d never have to look at the life that was waiting for her.
When she heard him come in, she stirred, and opened her eyes.
“You deserted me.”
“For a few hours.”
“To do what?”
“To surrender.” He hadn’t expected that.
“To what?” she said, and she pushed the sheets back just a little.
“The usual. My poems.”
“Words on the page.”
“Why not?”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the love,” she said, as if talking to herself, and then he noticed that her face was flushed, and her lips were faintly parted.
“For them,” he said. Whatever she needed—whatever he needed— he thought, came at some level deeper than the body.
She looked up at him, clearly piqued that the moment had been lost.
“You never talk about your parents.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“They’re in England?”
“They were. Not now.”
She looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You needn’t be. I never told you.”
“So that’s why . . .” and then she stopped herself.
“That’s why I’m the center of the Macmillan empire,” he said, to bring them up from the deep.
She didn’t laugh, though. She looked at him and looked at him, and then looked down, as if she was shaking.
“What is it?”
She shook her head, eyes full. “It’s too poignant.”
When he returned from the library next day, she was gone.
The darkness came on much earlier now, and soon the first winter storms were slashing through the town: two, three days of agitated skies, the sound of unrelenting rain, and then the streets outside were silent again, and pockets of blue could be seen in the white. Pieces of a broken pot, and the clouds just rimmed with light. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the storm moved on, and he awoke one morning to find the world as sharp as if it had just been slapped awake.
Early winter was the magic time in California, the days acquiring an edge, a form of sharpness, that they never had in the bleary summers. Voices soft and low in the sweatered dark, heat lamps on the terraces at six o’clock and around everything a kind of definition, a startled clarity, that gave the sunny days more meaning. In winter California became an older place, with secrets.
He called her occasionally to try to bring her back, but all he got was the sound of a phone ringing and ringing, now and then a male voice saying shortly, sharply, “This is 437-2962. Talk!” Then, a few days later, three hectic beeps that told him that the tape was now full: no messages could be taken in any case.
“We run from our fears,” he wrote, pushing himself back into the papers on his desk, “and so run from the very place where our transformation might be hiding. We wall ourselves in with what we think we know, and then what we don’t know, which is what can save us, is left knocking on the door.” Then, wondering what he was really writing about, he tried to open the books on the desk to bring himself back to the matter at hand: the fact that Rumi had signed half of his poems with the name “Shams”—the bedraggled stranger he had claimed as his own—and the fact, on top of that, that this was a metaphor as well as an ancient gesture: in Persian, “Shamsuddin” means “Religious Sun.”
“Five hundred of his poems, more,” he went on, “Rumi ended with the word for silence. As if to say that words or poems can only take you so far, and no farther. At some point you have to cast off from reason, say goodbye to the things you can explain and then . . .”
And as he began to finish the sentence, as seemed to happen every time he was back in his dissertation now, the phone on the desk began to ring.
He let it go unanswered, not eager to come back through the centuries to hear a telemarketer make his sales pitch (or, what seemed little different, to hear a well-meaning classmate talk about a manuscript that had shown up in Herat), and then, as the unknown caller continued to talk—no click—he turned the volume up to see why the intruder was going on so long.
On the machine, the voice he least expected to hear: “. . . the unwarranted intrusion,” Sefadhi was saying, “but if I don’t hear otherwise from you, I shall expect to see you at six p.m.”
He played the whole message back again, the volume higher, and heard what might have been a practical joker, or a trick concocted by some Department prankster: what sounded like his adviser summoning him for an “informal meeting” two days from now, on the beach. So informal that he was fixing a time and place. In all the time they’d worked together, Sefadhi had made it a point never to meet him outside the office; if anything, he’d tried to screen him off from any glimpse of a private life. When, once, one of his graduate students had summoned the courage to ask him about this, he’d just said, in his characteristic way, “Limits are what give meaning to affection.”
It sounded so much like a ruse that he wondered what could lie behind it. Was Sefadhi concerned that his most loyal student was running after manuscripts that didn’t exist, moving in the opposite direction from his thesis? Or did he have some message to impart, about where real manuscripts might be?
When he arrived at the Beachside Bar on the appointed day, a few minutes before six—Sefadhi was ruthless in such courtesies—the waiter led him out onto the terrace, and he saw his teacher sitting alone at a round table with a white tablecloth on it. As soon as he heard the approaching footsteps, the older man looked around and stood up to greet him, and his slightly informal wear—an open-necked white shirt and sweater—made him look as he seldom did: forlorn.
“What will it be, John?” he said, taking care not to sit down till his student had done so.
“Just a Coke,” he said, knowing that his adviser would never drink in public.
Around them it was already dark, and the waiters were stepping from table to table to turn on the heaters. The tables with their white linen, laid out in front of the sea—the islands outlined in the distance, and fading into the dark—looked like a party someone had arranged for friends who would never come. Sefadhi asked him in a desultory way about Seville, who had asked after him, who had not: all the questions he could have asked, and didn’t, at their debriefing session. Then, as if casually, he told him a little about what had happened to Uwe while he was away: the Department was still alive with the news of the Dutch student who, six months before the completion of his doctorate on Scientology, had suddenly taken flight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the word had it, his life had begun to turn into a television melodrama. His cat had been found dead on his driveway; his children had been handed notes at the day-care center; someone had even said that he’d gone and done the Witness Protection thing, taking a name from an old gravestone, and living now under another identity in a far-off town.
“They found out about his thesis, I gather.”
“Or somebody told them,” said Sefadhi, pointedly. “What about you? The manuscripts you were so excited about.”
“Not excited now. They don’t seem eager to be found.”
“No one’s been of any help?”
“The opposite. The people who know something seem the last ones to talk.”
“And the ones who know nothing talk and talk.”
He guessed, from his professor’s joke, that he’d given the right answer.
“And if I did find something . . .”
“It would be worse.”
“I know. It’s better that I don’t.”
“A complicated field,” said Sefadhi, jangling a few nuts from the small whi
te bowl in his palm as he spoke. “I never really told you, I think, about Leila.”
“Your first wife?”
“My only wife.” A flash of steel behind the curtain. “The reason I’m here. The official reason, at least: SOAS, California, my life in the West”—he contrived to give the last phrase the feeling of inverted commas—“the whole thing.”
“She worked here, I think I heard. Or studied here at least.”
“Worked, yes. After a fashion. Before I knew her. By the time we met, she was in London, at the embassy.”
“A diplomat?”
“In a sense. In London she was first secretary.”
It was unclear to him why Sefadhi was saying any of this; the more he said, the less clear it was why he was saying anything at all.
Then, playing with his stirrer, and rubbing his hands together to rid them of the dust of almonds, he said, “What you have before you, John, is that most implausible of figures in your English spy novels, the unsuspecting husband of a spy.”
“That can’t be.”
“Why not? We always had a large presence in London; it was there long before Mossadegh. Many of our people were working covertly. And I, a student, became that unhappiest of clichés, a spy’s half-knowing spouse. A funny thing to be, in both senses of your word.”
“Everything okay with you gentlemen tonight?”
The waiter was standing at their side—he’d seen that the older man’s glass was empty—and Sefadhi, shaken from his story, ordered a second soda water while his student shook his head no. Around them, as the wind blew in from the sea, the waiters were bowing down to try to light a candle on every table.
“As you can imagine, it was not easy. I could ask nothing, I could know nothing. When she was late at the office, when she was called away to an overseas trip; when she went out and didn’t come back for three days . . .” The new drinks arrived, and he paused. “Of everything I could know nothing.”
When someone entrusts you with a secret—this had been Alex’s wisdom, years before—he’s trying, as often as not, to keep you from some deeper secret. If someone tells you he’s the husband of a spy, it may be a way of keeping you from thinking that he’s a spy himself.
“So you never knew anything?”
“Nothing. If she took meetings in a hotel, if she went suddenly to Europe, if she disappeared without a word, I could know nothing. It was nothing dangerous or difficult, she used to tell me, but it was better for me to keep my innocence.”
He said nothing, so Sefadhi would continue, but his adviser seemed to need no prompting.
“She could have been enjoying a contact that was ‘extracurricular,’ in your words. She could have been making deals with Iraq, with Hafez Assad. She could have been reporting on me to the authorities. I never even saw her passport.”
“And this went on a long time?”
“I met her in ’73. It ended in ’79.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was called back to Tehran, shortly before the change in government. I never heard from her again.”
“You don’t even know if she’s alive?”
“I know nothing. If I am a married man; if I can take another wife. What happened to her house near the Winter Palace—she used to show me pictures. Her grandparents near the border, the cinema they ran. Nothing. It’s better, perhaps. If I knew something, it would be worse. If we had both been in Tehran in ’79 . . .” and then his voice trailed off, even his grammar and syntax falling away.
Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then, feeling that his teacher was waiting for him to draw some conclusion, he said, “There’s a virtue in keeping quiet.”
“A virtue in remembering what you’re up against.” Sefadhi sounded like himself now, as if they were back in his office. “These men are not gentlemen.”
“Things have consequences, in other words.”
“Always. Unintended consequences.”
The older man drained his second glass quickly and then called for the bill; when it came, he drew out a black pen with gold trimming, elegant even in this casual meeting. “I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself,” he said, as he calculated the tip and signed. “A private consultation between student and teacher.”
“Of course.”
They got up, and as they began walking out, suddenly the older man slipped, and grabbed onto the tablecloth to keep himself from falling. A glass of water spilled its contents across his sweater.
When he came out into the parking lot, more steady now, it was as if the man so in command of things in the office had been replaced by someone more faltering, more poignant; someone not sure of what part he was meant to play. “Next time, our usual place, our usual hour,” said Sefadhi, collecting himself as he went over to his car. As he unlocked the door, the older man seemed to be shivering a little in the winter night.
When he got home, unable now to settle to the reading he’d promised himself, he pulled out a piece of paper from the bottom drawer and, in the precise and meticulous way that Sefadhi himself had taught him, began to make a diagram of the forces gathering in his life, a “star map,” as his adviser would have called it.
On the one side, there was Khalil, who’d somehow led to Kristina, then Camilla, and then whatever lay beyond Camilla; on the other, the men from Westwood, the strange fanatic in Seville, whoever called him up to say nothing, or sent him unsigned faxes. As he looked down, it seemed that the drawing was beginning to look like a maze, one of those puzzles Camilla so loved to toy with. How thread your way to the center without repeating your steps at any point? And how link one side to the other without noticing that the only thing they have in common is the one person you tell yourself you are not growing closer to?
“Make a list of what’s important”—it had been Sefadhi’s injunction, in his first year here—“and then eliminate from the bottom.”
He drew out a piece of blue letter paper from his desk and began to write.
Dear Benedict (if I may, after all these years),
It’s been a long time since I was last in touch and I know that generations of new disciples must be clamoring at your door. But I did want to say hello again, after all this time, and to tell you how things are going over here. Also (as you’ve no doubt guessed), to solicit your advice on something: you can be assured I’m not completely disinterested.
You told me when I chose to go to SOAS, and implied the same when I asked for the reference for the Scholarship, that I should be ready for a “hall of mirrors,” as I think you called it. I was, of course I said, and of course, as usual, I didn’t know the first thing about what I was getting into. I never realized what a strong division separates those who are party to this world from those who aren’t. I feel at times like a kind of neophyte in some kind of Underworld. Except that the Underworld is the real world, and I have to find my way in it. Like when I was in Damascus, not long ago, and every little lane I turned into in the Old City seemed to have a blue sign on it that said “Cul-de-saque.” Wasn’t it you who told me that in medieval Cairo half the roads were cul-de-sacs?
In any case, the images are catching, rather, and one doesn’t know where to stop. But the reason I’m writing now is that I’ve begun hearing, here and there, about certain manuscripts, not widely known of in the West, that might have come out of Iran in recent years. They could be in France, though more likely they’re somewhere here in California. People seem so reticent about them that I’m sure there must be something there—even if I’m hardly the person to make sense of it all. Those who care about the manuscripts, of course, as well as those in possession of them, all have considerable reason to keep their cards very close to their chests and to keep them out of public view.
I know this isn’t strictly your field, and I realize I’m not giving you very much to go on. But if I did come upon one of these anthologies, what exactly would I do with it? Especially when others regard the texts as a matter of life and death. I suppo
se I come to you largely because you’re not in the field: you’re an innocent, in that way. Everyone else has an agenda, to the point where one is least inclined to trust the people closest to one.
Might you have time for a chat when next I’m in England? I don’t know when that will be, but for now I wish you and of course Miss Mowbray all happiness and health. I also hope you’ll enlighten us on St. Teresa. What was she doing on all those long nights alone? I hope you’ll tell us.
With every best wish,
John Macmillan
Then, picking up the telephone, and looking again at the list he’d drawn up, he dialed her number and when he heard the voice again on the answering machine—“This is 437-2962. Talk!”—said quickly, directly, “Camilla, I’m going on a trip, up north. Any chance of your being free for a small adventure?”
The next day, she arrived just as it was getting light—in her ineffable fashion, the only way she could find to meet him in the morning was by driving through the night and then camping out near his house until dawn. The sensible thing would have been for her just to come and stay overnight, but already they were both moving warily around the memories of dinner appointments lost, his waiting and her worrying. To be insanely early seemed safer all around than being dangerously late.
She piled her things into the back of his car—things and more things—and then they headed north, past the last stretch of undeveloped beach in the area, driving through almost rural parts of suburbia, and great meadows that ran along the freeway, the sea beyond the train tracks blue. After a hundred miles or so, the road trickled into the coastal highway again, and they drove along a single-lane emptiness, with cows grazing above the road to one side—placid as creatures from an older world, going nowhere—and a lighthouse here and there set among the rocks and the foaming ocean on the other.
Long stretches of virgin beach ran along the cliffs, and the colors were primary and stark: green fields, high blue skies, patches of flowers, and the greenish sea. Years ago, in another world, this was the place he’d dreamed of when he thought of California: a territory still unclaimed where people lived among eternities. No history, no tradition, no society, no preordination: only whatever the rocks and the light and the changeable sky seemed to determine.
