by Iyer, Pico
As they proceeded up towards the very top of the hill—a red light winking from a satellite far above, she peering over the huge wheel like the captain of a very uncertain ship—suddenly they hit a bank of fog again, the cloud level, and when they turned a corner, coming into blue skies once more, she pulled abruptly up a steep driveway, and they found themselves on a crest.
“What are you doing? What’s up?”
“I want to look. I’ve never been up here before.” The truck was alone, at the edge of a steep slope, amidst fog and winter chill and silence. She got out, and the slamming door resounded in the emptiness. He followed, and they found themselves, in the mist, on the flat ridge, in front of the outlines of a house. There were no curtains on the windows and plate-glass doors, and they could see that there were no real divisions in the house yet: just planks everywhere and cellophane, chalkmarks, measurements scrawled in black, the outlines of a life.
“Let’s check it out,” she said, walking towards the ghostly place, marked out the way policemen in the movies draw silhouettes of bodies when there’s been a murder. “No one’s here yet.”
“They will be soon, I think.”
But she was away from him now, walking around the house, peeping through windows, tapping on the walls, as if she were a county inspector, stopping now and then to yank at a door clearly locked from the inside. He went the other way, inspecting this strange place, alone on a hilltop, of expectations, and few memories.
Then, suddenly, through the chilly, misty early light, “John. Over here. Come quickly.”
He went over to where he could hear her voice coming from, on the far side, down a rocky slope, at what must be the lower level, and when he got to where she’d been, she was nowhere in sight.
“Come on. In here.” The girl in her, whatever was hopeful, stealing into a place—apparently one door had remained unlocked—and making it, for a small while, her own.
Her steps were crackly on the cellophane, and the wooden boards were cold underneath his feet. The rooms were still dark in the absence of natural light, and as they walked they had to move carefully, not to smudge the figures and marks chalked up on the floor here and there. The corridor that linked the rooms was close to pitch-black.
“What do you think?” Her face was radiant. “Our very own house.”
“Until they come back. A few minutes from now. I imagine they start working at seven or eight.”
“Just five seconds more,” she said, not pleading but walking away from him again, so he couldn’t pull back, and tiptoeing up a small flight of stairs to a space so huge that it would surely one day be the living room. Large windows on three sides admitted them to a world of fog, and against one wall were the outlines of a fireplace.
“A whole house from scratch,” she said in wonder, “according to their dreams.”
“I don’t think their dreams included us. We should come back sometime when we know they won’t be coming.”
He turned and walked down the stairs again—a hint—but she went on, marking the territory as an animal might.
“I’ll only leave if we can come back tonight,” she said, catching up with him at last where he stood in the mist outside the door left unlocked.
“Of course we can.”
Back in the house, he went to his desk (the way a ship might go back to port), and she, stretching her arms and closing her eyes, said, “Mind if I watch?”
“Not at all.”
He posted himself at his desk, and she curled up in the armchair a few feet away. He looked at the book on Hafez, but all he could see was someone drawing a brush through her hair, again and again and again.
“Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Am I disturbing you?” Over and over, almost absently, long fluid strokes that caught the light.
“No. It’s fine.” He threw himself back into the books, almost physically, but it was useless: always, at the edge of his vision, someone pulling out a strand of hair and looking at it cross-eyed, or combing and combing, to let all the tangles out.
“What are you working on?”
“The usual. Why Sufis believe in the dark—as the place they can see the light.”
“Like us. In the car.”
“I don’t think so.” Sefadhi’s harangue had been hard to forget.
“What do you think they’d say if they could see us now?”
“They’d be appalled. We’re about as far from them as anyone could be.”
“They believed in ritual and order,” she said, and he thought of how the two of them had arrived at the same door this morning, but coming from different sides.
“They believed in everything this place negates.”
She stopped what she was doing. “You don’t think you’ll ever find anything that no one’s ever seen before?”
“I’ll be lucky to find a single sentence no one has ever written before.”
An hour or so after dark, they drove up again into the hills, in his car this time, which took the curves more easily, she, in her customary way, making it a ceremony, a secret rite, by bringing a bag in which she’d packed provisions. The fog had lifted long ago, and when they pulled up the sharp driveway to the ridge, they were looking down on lights now, hovering, the winking red blinkings of small planes, coming down to land at the airport by the sea, the presence of islands out beyond.
The streets of the small downtown were long yellow lines, only a few cars buzzing along them, and for a moment he felt he was in Granada again, in one of the Alhambra’s dark rooms, sealed off somehow from the lights of the town, and so in a position to appreciate them more.
When they were inside, though—the door gave again, easily (a measure, perhaps, by which the construction workers ensured they’d never get locked out)—it was pitch-black. She’d brought a blanket, a small flashlight to guide them through the darkened rooms, but the reach of it was small, and the house, the wind gusting around, seemed very large. As they walked, they bumped against pieces of wood, bruised shins against objects that hadn’t been there in the morning, so it seemed.
“This can be our special place,” she said, after leading him up into the large space among the open windows. “We can come here whenever we want to. Our very own abandoned house.”
“It’s not abandoned. It’s getting more occupied every day. And we can’t come anytime we want.”
“After hours, then. When it’s dark.”
For her, he thought, an empty space; for him, a place coming up and taking shape every day. In their different perceptions, all the distance that lay between them.
Through the windows now, surrounding them, there were lights. A shiver of yellow from the sleeping town below; stars intermittent in the skies; the bright-red lights of cars behind, pushing through the mountains.
“I’ve brought candles,” she said. “A bottle of wine. We can be anyone we want here.”
“Within reason,” he said, and then realized how wrong that sounded. She was trying to pull them away from boundaries.
“It’s like undressing in reverse,” she said, as she pulled out a box of matches and lit a candle.
Her face was eerie in the small light, hollowed out, ancestral (the word seemed constantly to be coming to him now). She was previous, in some way: previous, perhaps, even to all she’d suffered in her life. The light caught ridges, different angles in her face; her eyes were bright, her hair was loose against the dress she’d brought.
He had a premonition of being here before, and wondered whether it was dreamed, or just a trick of consciousness: a moment ago remembered as an eternity. Her voice, when it carried to him through the dark, was mysterious, charged; everything is intimate when it’s whispered.
There was a strange intensity about them now, impossible to doubt: the scooped-out faces in the thin light, their bodies making shadows on the naked wall across from them. No furnishings but the lights below, and the wind gusting along the paths and making the windows
shake.
“Closer,” she said in the near darkness. “Over here.”
He followed the sound of her voice—she’d moved the candle round to the other side of her—and then felt a hand steadying him, lips on his neck, the fall of hair.
She smelled of something exotic—he remembered the bottle of ylang-ylang she’d put into her bag—and her hands were nimble, active in the dark. What she’d said was true: they weren’t themselves in this light.
The wind came up again outside, and they could hear small bushes and pieces of debris being pushed along the walkway. The windows, the screen doors rattled, and it felt as if the wind would send the house itself gusting and howling over the edge of the ridge. “Is this what your poets taught you?” she said, very close to him in the flickering light, lips, wrists, hands wet with oil all around. “Let’s see what it is we’re not allowed to do.”
Shortly before dawn they got up, replete with the sense of something they’d touched that they couldn’t understand. Again they’d come close to the edge of something, and he’d turned back, and she, looking at his eyes, had turned back, too; around that corner, whatever they knew would be greater than what they didn’t. They got in his car and drove back through the waking world, and when they let themselves into his house they saw what they’d gone away to put behind them: a red light blinking on the answering machine.
“See who it is,” she said. “It could be urgent.”
“That’s why I don’t want to see who it is.”
“It could be for me,” she said. “It could be anyone.” But he knew this was the one number she’d never give to anyone she knew.
In mid-afternoon, while she slept, he got up and tiptoed over to the machine, curiosity alight. It was probably someone from England, he thought, calling to invite himself to stay. Or Alejandro, eager to convey some piece of droll wisdom, about how the person you have to look out for is the person you say you’re not taken with.
It was none of that; it was his most frequently unexpected caller now, Sefadhi, with a brief and purring message. It was as if his passionate essay on Attar had somehow roused an animal from its lair, and now his professor was stalking him, or trying to pursue him back out of the light.
“John,” said the urbane voice, composure recovered since their uneasy meeting by the sea, “a little something has come up, in India, next week. Something I think you can be helpful with. A Christmas present from a Moslem, if you like. If you could call Eileen to confirm your acceptance, I would be most grateful.”
He dialed the number reflexively, keenly aware that he was being asked to accept an offer that hadn’t even been presented to him yet, and Eileen, when she answered, sounded nervous. “I’m sorry. He’s caught up in a meeting right now. No. For how long, I don’t know.” So nervous he felt he could see his adviser by her side, gesturing furiously as she spoke.
“Will he be free later on?”
“I can’t promise anything,” she said, still anxious, and then, from the other room, came a sleepy call. “Who is it? Someone for me?” And he realized what it was his adviser was trying to pull him away from.
She was looking up eagerly when he came in, her face washed clean of all its usual doubt. All she needed, he’d come to see, was a place where she felt protected, and then she could claim the stronger person who was waiting for her, inside. She looked at him, and he saw the opening she was beginning to occupy with her mind; a vacation, he away from his books, she away from Los Angeles. And the abandoned house in the hills the first place they’d come upon where they could leave behind the world—and the pasts that seemed confinement.
“It’s just,” he said, trying to find the words, “something has come up. Nothing important. But I have to go and check in with my adviser. I’ll be back soon.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said, and he looked away from the hopefulness.
He took the long way round to the library, to give himself time to think, and when he went in, he walked up, with sudden purpose, to the new second-floor computers. Years before, when he’d arrived, he’d told himself he should learn everything he could about his mysterious adviser, and had started to spend long hours with the card catalogue (no computers in those days); then, after a week or so of this, he’d told himself that if they were going to work together it was better to know nothing. The same tendency, as Alex had pointed out, he seemed to be exercising with her: what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Now, however, he had a purpose, and when he typed in his adviser’s name, the computer whirred a little, told him to wait, and then threw up a long list of green codes and titles on the screen. He scanned them quickly, and saw what he expected: all the stuff, in fact, that had made him decide not to explore too much before. Many of the items referred the reader to obscure journals in Farsi, from around the world, or Festschrifts to which his adviser had contributed; one entry noted a piece written with a Frenchman, in a magazine from England, another some contribution to an anthology. The topic, in almost every case, Sefadhi’s special interest, poems from Isfahan not widely known of in the West.
He pushed the button that led to the next screen, and there found more of the same: not a single mention of Shiraz, or Rumi, or anything that might have come as a surprise to him.
Then, getting up to stretch his legs, he walked up to the eighth floor and back, and something in the movement jogged his mind: years ago, Pauline had said something about how Sefadhi, once upon a time, had written a few pieces under his father’s name. No one knew why exactly, whether this was a custom of some kind or a precaution—akin to the Anglicizing of his family name, Sefaredi— but it had made his bibliographers’ lives a misery, she said.
He tried to retrieve now the father’s name—it was one of the commonest in Iran, he recalled—and then, going through the options on the screen, he saw the one he recognized. “Ardeshir Sefaredi, 1953–.” He tapped at a button, and, a few seconds later, a new list of entries appeared, much shorter than the first, and none of them more recent than 1985. Many of the pieces weren’t translated yet (or transliterated ineptly by some unknown programmer).
As he scrolled down the list, he could detect nothing out of the ordinary—once shaken out of their code, these items were much the same as before. Close to the top, however, was one entry that looked different: from 1984, the computer said, and from something called Persiflex Press (an exile concern, he assumed, in Los Angeles). Its length was unusual—thirty-six pages only—and its title, not in Farsi, announced, almost defiantly, “The Desert of the Sacred, the Desert of the Profane.”
He followed the call numbers up to the fourth-floor extension, and when he came to the Iranian section, he found a large anthology of Isfahani poetry (never checked out, the slip on the back page told him), and another book on the conventions of Isfahani literature. Slipped between them, slim as some secret message a student had left for his beloved, was a pale-blue pamphlet, hardly larger than a theater program.
He took the pamphlet to a nearby carrel, and when he opened it up and began reading, something in him seemed to stop. It was not that the content was so surprising, or different from what he might have expected, but the manner, the voice in which it disclosed itself bore no relation to the elegant figure he knew. The sentences were rough, unruly, passionate—it felt as if they had been scrawled out very quickly, after dark—and they hardly seemed to care who was reading them, or what another scholar might say. They read, in fact, like the utterings of a man possessed.
There are two kinds of desert in the world—this seemed to be its thrust—the desert of faith and the desert of anarchy. “In one place, people search for water, look for what materials can sustain them; in the other, people look only for themselves.” He thought back now to the parable of Attar’s that had loosed such invective in his teacher, and wondered if the source of his adviser’s rage was a kind of recognition: nothing unsettles us like the sound of our own voice echoed back to us. “In one desert people gather around a m
osque, a walled city, or a circle,” the text went on, “in the other they never stop. They move and move, towards a horizon they can never reach. We might almost say that the people who gather are the ones who wish to be found by God, while the people who seek are the ones who wish to have God found inside themselves.”
It was an edgy piece, unhinged in some way, and what gave it its particular charge, he saw, was some kind of division in its writer: as if the man longed to affirm one form of order, yet found himself drawn to another. Or was somehow trying to articulate, or exorcise, his betrayal in these pages, as if to thrash out the impulses that were leading him away from the world he sought to defend.
The history of Persia, the piece went on, more unexpectedly, was the history of the war between these visions, the Green Revolution taking over from the White, one group filling the emptiness with the gaudy tents of Persepolis, the other with the glittering shrines of Sufi saints. “In the old days we drank in public and prayed only in private,” the young writer went on, more conventionally. “Now, on the far side of the world, we go to the mosque every Friday, and drink and weep in secret. Two kinds of treasure we have about us, an outer and an inner, and the one is concealed within the other.”
It was the kind of thing that was likely to make sense to almost no one but a close associate; at times it sounded like one of those preachers who appeared on the airwaves on Sunday mornings to rail about fire and brimstone. But this demagogue wrote of what came after the fire and brimstone: silence, uprootedness, uncertainty. On and on the ragged aphorisms went, for many pages, less and less interesting as they continued (a fire is most commanding at first glance), and then, at last, they subsided into a final comparison, not surprising, of the land of exile (“a place of modernity, disorder”) and the beloved home left behind (“a land of secrets”).
