by Iyer, Pico
She went down first, as was their custom, and he came slowly after. When he walked down to the lower level of the house, where she always waited for him, he found her standing there as ever. But when she looked up, her eyes were full.
“It’s over. It’s locked. We’ve lost our secret place forever.”
“It can’t be. Let me try.”
He pulled at the door, and tried to jiggle the screen that protected it. It didn’t budge. He got out a paper clip and fumbled ineffectively with the lock, but nothing turned, or yielded to his wishes. He banged against the window with his fist.
“It’s gone,” she said, almost inaudible. “It’s locked forever.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. Let’s try the other doors.” They walked around the house, stopping every few yards to pull at a screen, to see if an upper window would give. It wouldn’t. Around the far side, she found a screen door only partially obscured by curtains and said, “Look. Over there.” Light fixtures on the walls, a carpet on the floor.
“It’s been a while since we were here last.”
“Too long.” Though it had been only a couple of weeks. “The one place we could trust, the only place that was ours, and now it’s gone.”
“I’m sure we can find a way in.” He left her in the driveway and walked around the house clockwise, the way they’d never done before. He pulled at doors, tried to unriddle locks. Nothing moved. In the driveway now he saw a small blue sign warning of the security company that kept watch over the house; on the side of one wall, a dull red security alarm waiting to light up.
“Shall we try again tomorrow?”
“What good will that do? There are lights now, carpets—there’ll be people living here before long.”
“We could try.”
“It’d only make it worse.” She went and stood by the passenger door of his car, and he thought it was a phantom waiting to get in. All the life was gone from her, and she looked spent. He’d told her to come out of hiding, her face said, and as soon as she had, her door had locked behind her. He was just like all the rest.
The next day, the lecture hall was almost empty. A few loyal souls had shown up, doubtless to help Sefadhi, and a handful of others sat here and there in the middle rows to give the impression of fullness. But the vast majority of the seats were unclaimed. Esfandi had for some reason entitled his lecture “Fire and Surrender in the Islamic Way,” as if not remembering, or even caring, that Islam was hardly a popular subject around here. If he’d substituted the word “Sufi,” there’d have been blondes in the back row.
When the guest of honor followed Sefadhi through the side door, to the front row, the student watching them caught his breath: he’d seen the man somewhere before, he was sure of it. At the store in Westwood, months before? The assistant to the suave young broker?
The stranger was dressed in a light cotton suit, with a white shirt that set off his dark eyes and thick beard, and there was nothing about him that was relaxed. He didn’t smile as his host chatted with him, and even when Sefadhi went up to the podium and delivered his usual encomium to the latest messiah, the man registered no hint of recognition or self-effacement. He sat, arrow-straight, in the front row, and when the introduction was over, he went straight up to the lectern and began to speak.
He had no notes and he gave no preamble. He just began to speak, in a high-pitched, piercing voice that sounded like a flute.
“Sometimes,” he began, “you have been in love. You lie awake in the dark, you pace and pace through the night. You get up, you lie down, you comb your hair again and again. You know no world but this world, and you know no sound but the one you’re listening for.
“When you know this feeling, you know you will do anything for your love. Nothing is too much for you; you will protect her with your life. You are not yourself without her; you do not have interests except her interests. Anyone who threatens her, you will punish, even to the death.
“Please think of this—please think of this again—when you hear of suicide bombers in the Middle East or ‘acts of terror.’ Please think of how you will do everything for those you have promised to protect forever. When you hear your journalists speak of our jihad, and people who will shed blood to protect their temples, please think of this. Love is not the place for compromise. Who half protects a love?
“The Sufi is the same as this. But his love is for a force that never dies.”
Nobody in the audience stirred, and nobody whispered. The man’s accent was strange, and his diction didn’t fit; but the concentration of his thought was absolute.
“The Sufi’s home is the lover’s home, which is the paradox that stands beyond all reason. I am rich because I have nothing. I am full because I am no one. It is daytime for me when the world is dark, and midnight at bright noon. And because his world is everything that is not in the world around him, he cries out only for annihilation. ‘Kill me now,’ Hallaj told his friends; ‘I long to be with the One I love.’ ”
The words were coming out fast, too fast in many cases to be understood; it was like seeing the holy verses in the mosque, a swirl of lines rising so high so fast that soon their meaning disappeared and all you could feel was their fury and their beauty.
“When you are in love—you know this, all of you—you are not yourself. You have no self. The world is a grid of shining correspondences. And the correspondences sing like angels. You cannot defile them with your intentions. You cannot undo the order that is suddenly revealed to you. All you can do is become a part of it and move in hallowed light.
“Your friends make jokes about your absentmindedness. Your parents tell you you’re deluded. All the people around ask you to come back to the person they know. But you are dead to them. The world has no meaning to you. Everything you once cherished is irrelevant, and you are far above it. The only truth you know is the truth around you. And you know, more than that, that whatever you love, you cannot fail to love. You can no more be argued out of your devotion than a compass can be told not to find the north, the tides instructed not to follow their moon.
“‘Don’t come to me with reasons,’ you tell your friends. ‘Come to me with prayer bowls and songs.’”
She looked at him and he saw terror in her eyes: the man was pulling them towards everything that would take him away from her. He was speaking for the poets who were changeless, and the very words that once would have seemed a description of what they shared had now changed shape—or direction, rather—so they seemed to be an argument for separation. The visitor was talking of a love that never disappoints.
“In your tradition,” the man went on, “Jesus comes to you as a reflection of God’s grace on earth; in our tradition, all the world is such a reflection. The entire universe is God’s messenger, and all life is our redeemer. We look on Paradise when we see a Persian carpet. We walk through Paradise when we enter the garden outside an Islamic palace. We lose ourselves in Paradise when we read the verses in our mosques and open ourselves to the dome above. To the lover, all the world is blessed.
“In your tradition, also, you speak repeatedly of God’s love for man; in our tradition, it is more moving to speak of man’s love for God. We long for that to be bottomless and without end. And for the Sufi, the longing that we feel for God, He feels, too: God longs for us, as a hidden treasure longs to be discovered.
“You do not come to the Sufi way through your mind. The mind is a knife, useful only for cutting apart. You do not come to our path through your heart. The heart is a shield, for defending yourself against truth. You come to it through grief. Through the shock that breaks you open.
“In your tradition, you speak of loving the one who is the source of all your joy. In ours, we speak of loving the one who is the cause of all our sorrow. Our hearts are broken open, and then we know real loneliness.
“Our word for this is bala. Bala in our language means ‘affliction.’ Bala also means ‘yes.’ We say yes to affliction, and in affliction find our fa
ith. Thank you.”
There was a stunned silence, and already the man was at his seat, hardly acknowledging Sefadhi and staring straight ahead of him as before. Clearly he was a practiced speaker, even in a foreign language, used to taking his simple, burning message (memorized, perhaps) to schools and auditoriums everywhere. Yet the impact was like that of seeing a sleek train streaking across a far horizon, under snowcaps. Nobody knew what to say.
“Mr. Esfandi has graciously agreed to take questions,” said Sefadhi, ever the smooth peacemaker, but seeming more displaced than usual. “I am sure there is much you want to ask him.”
No hands came up, however. The man returned to the stage and stood before them, looking down with his burning eyes, but nobody ventured a word. At last, one slow, unsteady hand went up.
“You spoke, so passionately, so eloquently, about the possession of love, if we may call it that.” It was an elderly man he’d never seen before—a colleague from another department, perhaps, here to lend Sefadhi a helping hand. “You talked about the uselessness of judging it by earthly terms. Do you think we could relate this to the riddle in The Merchant of Venice?”
The man said nothing and looked back at him, unmoving.
“That is, if you seek love for what it can give you, if you seek love because of what you think is due you, you are lost. You have to give yourself over to it even if your love looks like a piece of lead.”
There were a few laughs from those present, eager to have the atmosphere lightened, but not from the man onstage.
“I think so,” he said, and looked around for further hands.
Debra, always reliable, complied.
“This annihilation, this fana, you speak of, right? Isn’t it better to say that it’s like an ‘unbecoming,’ in Schimmel’s words, not a destruction so much? More like an unraveling, a going back to roots? Schimmel says it’s not an ‘ecstasy’ so much as an ‘instasy.’ ”
“Yes,” said the man, now as silent as a few minutes before he had seemed possessed by words.
“I think we have time for one more,” said Sefadhi, and the plaintiveness in his face and voice, his unsteadiness as he stood up, gave a weight and dimension to his dapper manner that made him seem what he seldom seemed before, touching.
He put up his hand to help his teacher out. “Your talk was billed as ‘Fire and Surrender in the Islamic Way.’ Yet you haven’t mentioned ‘fire’ once.”
“Exactly,” said the man, and he stepped down from the podium, already looking for the door.
There was a scattering of bemused applause, and people looked around them as if for prompts or affirmations. It was as if a hurricane had passed through and now was gone except in the tremors it left behind.
“Give me a minute,” he said to her, and then hurried to the front to make contact with the man before he could make his escape. “He can help you with these Sufi riddles,” Sefadhi had said, and the very fact that the man looked so familiar (the fact that they might have met before, in an entirely different setting) gave him hope. The two men were just heading out the side door when he caught up with them—no one else had tried to detain the visitor—and he thrust out an awkward hand. “Excuse me,” he said, his hand ending up on the other man’s arm. “John Macmillan. I study with Professor Sefadhi here.” His adviser gave a watery benediction. “I was just wondering if you might have time while you’re here for a coffee, a brief discussion. I’m wrapping up a thesis on Sufi poetry.”
“I’m sorry,” said the man, as if he’d never seen him before. “Perhaps my cousin will have time.” He gestured towards another man, standing a little behind the two professors, young, with an even thicker beard.
This second man, whose fleshy face gave the appearance of friendliness and accessibility, said, “Yes. Shall we go now?”
He went back to where she was sitting, and the three of them followed the professors out into the winter sun. “Your cousin is quite a speaker,” he said, sounding stupid even to himself; the lecture had made all words sound stupid. Around them kids in tie-dye T-shirts, on skateboards, mountain bikes, with surfboards in their hands. Asian students gathered under trees in earnest conversation, teenagers more undisguised than most, holding hands or leaning into one another, giggling.
“You grew up in Iran together?”
“No,” said the man, in a way that did not encourage further questioning. He looked away from him, and the questioner thought: a brother, truly a cousin? A beloved?
“But you’ve known one another a long time?”
“Long enough.” With a slight smile. In Westwood the men had veiled themselves behind courtesies; here they seemed to be hiding out in public.
“Coffee, over there,” said the man, pointing to a cappuccino stand that sat beside the steps leading out from the library, and the three of them shuffled, in no set pattern, to the fresh-faced boy and got their drinks. She’d seemed uneasy throughout the afternoon, and their new guest gave no impression of being any happier.
“So,” said the visitor, as they found a low brick wall on which to sit while they sipped their drinks, “you study our tradition?”
“As much as I can. It’s not easy.”
The man nodded, sipping at his coffee very fast, as if to get away as soon as possible.
“The tradition doesn’t always like to be studied.”
“It studies you,” the man said, in the cryptic, portentous way that could seem enlightening if you had patience for the Persian way, infuriating if you didn’t. “That is its message.”
“You don’t go to Iran now?”
The man shook his head, cappuccino foam around his beard.
“It’s terrible over there, I’ve heard,” she said, and they both looked up. During the lecture he’d watched her playing with her hair, and drawing in her notebook—fairy towers and crescent moons and princesses in elaborate dresses out of Napoleonic balls, with hair falling down to the waist. But now, suddenly, she was engaged.
“It’s inhuman, what they do. There should be a law against them.” The man looked up, though not at her, and it was as if something had come unlocked in him, too.
“There should be more than a law,” he said. “Whatever you have heard is only a fiftieth of the truth. It is worse than you can imagine.” His eyes had a faint light in them, slow fire, and, as so often in California, a casual conversation between immigrants congratulating themselves on having found themselves here touched on the politics of a faraway country, and suddenly a door swung open to reveal a house on fire.
“And the way they treat women,” she went on.
“The way they treat everyone,” said the young man with the affable face. “Like pigs. Against everything in our holy book. Against everything the Prophet, peace be on his spirit, told us. Against all the words spoken by our teachers, about the reverence, the deference for women. All things.” He was alive now, and speaking as if in the streets of Isfahan.
“But we hear in the papers about a loosening up—”
“You ‘hear in the papers,’ ” he said with contempt. “Of course you hear in the papers this. Our leaders, our government, they are not—forgive me—innocents. They are not young men. They know everything you want to hear. They will talk of Hegel and Kant and moderation. Of ‘détente’ and ‘new relations with the West.’ On CNN. What else can they say? What have they got to lose?”
“But that’s better than before, surely, when it seemed we were headed for open warfare.”
“Better to pretend friendship than to have a war?” The man looked at him as if he were very young indeed. “I’m sorry. Maybe in your country this is a good thing, you can smile and shake hands and pretend all is happy. In my country, no. These politicians are very clever men; ours is not a young civilization. They speak English, they make jokes about religion. They talk about ‘hardliners’ and they say they are doing something different. You see their new suits from Paris and you think they are your friends.”
The whispers, the fe
ars, the suppositions of home ten times more urgent and desperate when they’re abroad.
“In the last year, two years, eight—no, I can say nine—of my friends have been killed. Taken into a field and shot. My own mother and father, in Tabriz, they cannot walk out of their home. They live like dead people already.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Of course you are sorry. You in the West are always sorry, very sorry for the sadness you have caused. You are excited because the ‘moderates,’ as you call them, come on the CNN and say all the things the West wants to hear. They are devils who know how to act as angels.”
The cappuccino was finished now; the man burned with all he hated.
“And the people live no better than before?”
“The ‘people,’ ” he said, spitting it out as if it were something that tasted foul. “The ‘people’ think only about one thing, and that is tomorrow. ‘How will we get food? What will happen to our children? How will we live tomorrow, and the next day?’ They will love the government only if the government stays out of their lives. If there is no war against Iraq, no war against Washington, no modernization campaign and new temple at Persepolis, they are happier than before. Like animals.”
“And Soroush? We hear he’s making a new kind of Islam, compatible with the West, trying to bring Islam into a better”—he searched for the right word—“understanding with the modern world.”
“You think they would let him speak if they didn’t control him? You think they would allow him to make this ‘better understanding’ if he were speaking against them?”
There was nothing left to say. She had fallen quiet, but she looked more sorrowful than he had ever seen her in public before; the man had finished his drink, and whatever they’d hoped to get from him, they’d gotten.
