by Iyer, Pico
“Thank you. My regards to your father.” Since, every time she spoke about him, he was always “my” father, and never “ours.”
He really had put all thoughts of manuscripts aside; the visitation from the passionate Iranians had worked on him like a slap in the face. He looked in on her where she slept as he went to his study one morning (she’d returned the previous night), and wondered how he could ever make a connecting corridor between the two rooms. The poems seemed to have no meaning unless they could speak to someone like them, in a different century and culture; and yet they, he and she, had no value unless they led to something beyond themselves, more durable. Mortal and immortal lover weren’t just different as “amor” and “love” were different—separate words for the same thing. They belonged to different worlds.
And yet (this, too, had been the point, surely, that the lecturer had been making) one can be an image of the other. As a man, seeing a picture of Isfahan, is taking the first step, in his mind, towards understanding what the place means, and seeing it more deeply. Even if the man is a woman, in Los Angeles, sitting in a cluttered room with the curtains drawn.
He sat down at his desk and, less than ever like himself, drew out a fresh piece of paper and wrote, almost triumphantly (defiantly), “EPILOGUE: THE HIDDEN JIHAD.” The words that came out were mad, excessive—not unlike the young Sefadhi in his pamphlet, the part of him that was sane might have said; but the part of him that wasn’t sane pressed on, about how every battle in the world (between left and right, between Old World and New) is just the same battle, between the part of us that thinks the world is capable of redemption, and the part that sees it as fallen. “One reason we turn to the Sufis today,” he wrote, “is that they give us a sense of angels in a culture in which we’ve consigned most celestial beings to the New Age shop (and the darker ones to the Cineplex). They tell us that we are subject to something outside ourselves, though able to remake ourselves at any moment (the angel is within); there are, of course, more angels in the Quran than in any holy book.
“This hopefulness does not seem fashionable in the modern world. Take Goethe, for example, the very Goethe who loved the Persians so deeply that he learned their language in order to read the poems in the original. Before he got to that stage, though, the same Goethe, author of Selige Sehnsucht, or ‘Blessed Longing,’ gave us Mephistopheles, a devil who can play on a man committed to freedom and movement. The Sufis, by comparison, give us a counter-Mephistopheles, an image of a stranger who, instead, calls us back to our rightful, better nature. And in a culture in which we have no gods but plenty of beliefs—or, as commonly, no beliefs but plenty of gods—and where happy endings disappeared with faith itself, what we need more than anything is . . .”
He heard something stirring at the far end of the room, and looked up.
“You look strange,” she said, standing at the door, for how long he couldn’t know.
“Not strange. Just preoccupied.”
“You look different,” she said, walking over to him. “More like Sefadhi the longer you study this stuff.”
“You hardly know him.”
“I know enough,” she said, and sat down on the armchair, picking up an old copy of a magazine.
“What is it? You look scared.”
“I haven’t seen this issue yet,” flipping through the old Rolling Stone. “Is there anything I’d like in here?”
“What’s happening, Camilla? Are you scared?”
“Of course I’m scared. I’m always scared.”
“But more than usual?”
“I can feel what’s going on.” She put down the magazine and looked at him. “I’m not stupid. I can feel you spending more time in here every day. I can’t blame you. Every day I give you some new reason to be done with me.”
“That’s why I’m here. To make sure we don’t get into that position.”
“But you’re alone. How does that help?”
“I’m trying to find a way we don’t have to fall apart.”
She looked down, everything vulnerable in her (of hope and fear) playing at the corners of her eyes.
“Come here.”
She got up and made her way to the desk where he was sitting. There was brightness on the beach outside, a surfer at the point. “Close your eyes,” he said, and she did. He ran a finger slowly under her shirt, down with the unclasping buttons, around her sides and up again, along her back. Her body relaxed a little, and there was a soft sound from above. Then, out of nowhere, racking sobs.
“What is it, Camel? What’s happening?”
Up on the desk now, papers, notes, all pushed to the floor.
“What is it, Camilla? What’s happening?”
“You touch me in every way. How can I not be terrified?”
The afternoon passed, and then the evening; small clouds settled on the ocean, and the night began to fall. Everywhere they looked, when they lifted themselves up, papers, index cards, piles of magazines and staples; a vast scattering of what had once been orderly and concrete. An argument reduced into thin air.
He went into the bedroom, when the terrace had lost all light, and brought back a blanket so they could lie beside each other on the floor: a version, though a poor one, of their abandoned house in the hills. The ocean was outside their window, after all; though here, unlike in the hills, they could hear its ceasings and recessionals.
She pushed herself deep into him, so there’d be less chance to say anything, and he lay on the ruins of the argument he’d so carefully constructed. Their bodies, where they were moist, smudging or blurring the words. The peace in the room existed outside the reach of words, and beyond the grasp of any of the notions he’d so carefully mapped out. It was the frame within which the high sentiments reposed.
“What is it?” He could tell she wanted to say something.
“Nothing. I feel better now.”
“Me, too.”
“I was thinking about what you told me about the nights you had at school. When it was light.” She stirred against him, and the movement was the only event in the room, in the strong moonlight, music coming from the house next door. “I know what you mean. I had days like that, too.”
“In England? When you were a student?” Beginning to edge back, since the places they had in common, in their separate lives, would only lead to separateness.
“No. Before that. When I was younger. This one time, when I was in high school, junior high perhaps, we went to see my aunt, from Denmark. She was living way up in the north—the Faeroe Islands— in a little house near a lake. It must have been eleven o’clock, twelve, late at night. I was in her garden, and we were waiting for the sun to set. Except it was June, and so the sun never set. It just went down for a while, sat on the sea, and then went up again.
“It was mysterious. Nothing very dramatic or special. But I can still remember the feeling—even though it was cold and I was with the people I was most scared of, and this was a strange place, a long way from California. It was like being told there were other things in the world they’d never told you about at school. The fact that the sun could never set for days and there’d be no night, no stars, no anything. The kind of thing we thought only happened on the moon.”
“You stayed there all night?”
“I tried. But my mother came in and noticed I wasn’t in bed. Noticed I was happy, I guess. So she made sure we returned to Copenhagen the next day, and never went back to her sister’s house again. The one thing she could never forgive was my being happy.”
He held her close, invited her to bury herself in him, erase.
“That’s one of the times she taught me my lesson. That I should never care for anything. Because if I did it would be taken away.”
“You weren’t into acting then?”
“Unh-unh.”
The strange sentences he’d written earlier in the day were underneath them, illegible in the dark and perhaps never to be read again. The space on top of the desk was almost clear. The day
s were lengthening, and the last winter storm seemed to have passed through; they were moving into the expansive time of the year when they had first met.
“And the hiding went on?”
“Not always. There was another time, a few more times. Once, I remember, at a lake, when I was lying on a blanket, on this great green meadow, by the water—sounds stupid, I know, like I got it from some video. But I was alone, or felt I was alone. Whoever I was with must have gone off exploring or something. And I was just lying there—there was a light wind, it was a summer day—and watching the clouds. They looked like horses and dragons and wolves. And then, at some point, everything went still. I wasn’t looking at clouds. Clouds were looking at me. And I fell through something, like Alice or one of those kids I read about, and became someone different for a while.”
“So you know what I mean.”
“In a way. But I don’t think it’s something you can write about. The thesis you’re writing, the lecture that guy gave, all that stuff ? I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it. Look at your adviser: he’s been living with these poems all his life. But whatever is real in him is something else. Which only his daughter knows.”
“Maybe it’s just an excuse for us to spend all day thinking about these bright ideas.”
“Maybe. I knew when I was at the lake I never wanted to come up into my regular life again.”
They lay on the floor, wrapped in blankets, and for a while it was as if they were in their cabin in the woods, or the room outside of time. He willed and willed the phone not to ring, and for a while at least it complied. There was a chance for making a space outside the world even here, in his study, with the papers scattered round like rags after something spills.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not hungry. Just happy. Not anything.”
A little later, she took his hand and put it where she was warmest. A wet field in early morning. “‘The secret path,’” she said, mischief curling at the edge of her voice. “That’s what they call it in Vietnam.”
In the morning, not unexpectedly, the homily (or hidden letter, or whatever it was he had written the previous day) was gone. Crumpled here, misarranged there. Fully lost to posterity. Which was a good thing, all in all: for Sefadhi it would have been akin to a piece of burning paper, a torch held up to all the chapters they’d completed. And she had answered everything in it without having to look at it. We build our great monuments of words, and then the earth shakes, the fires roar down from the hills, and all of them are gone except the parts we carry inside.
The days of spring went on, flowers ablaze in the mountains, the skies cloudless and exalting, the foothills so full of wild mustard that at times it felt as if they were walking through avenues of light. The whole state on fire, rejoicing, while the two worlds in his life he tried to bring together both seemed to recede and pull away from him— his thesis recalcitrant, as if his distrust of the words had transmitted itself to the paper; she needing at the first touch to jump back, like a girl who’s put her finger on the stove.
“All this time together and I still don’t know what’s important to you,” he said one day, when they were lying together in the afternoon, the room washed with light and silence.
“I don’t know myself. If I did, I’d tell you.”
“But you must have some sense.”
She looked at him as if he hadn’t understood a thing. “If I found out what I cared about, I’d have to bury it. Otherwise—I don’t know—it would bury me.”
He watched her in the mornings—she nearly always woke up hours after he did—and collected all the reasons he’d ever had to love her. She was a good sleeper, hardly stirring where she lay. She gave herself up to the peace and then held it close for hours and hours on end. When she faced the light, the sun caught the gold in her hair, just where it framed her eyes; her small mouth looked not just content, but able to be itself, shy, with not a trace of self-consciousness. One of the things she’d taught him, as he watched her fear give way at times to radiance, was that self-consciousness is the exact opposite of self-confidence.
When she began to smile in her sleep, and he saw her rising up towards the day, he fetched lemonade or juice for her, and waited by the bed so that he would be the first thing that she saw; she was trustful when she woke, fresh with all the places she’d been, and forgetful of herself: if they couldn’t come to an understanding then, they never could. He pulled back the thin shades that filtered some of the light; she reached for him, pulled him under the covers, turned from the light, and buried her head in his chest, his shoulders.
One day, when she was in this open state—he couldn’t try it any other time—he said, very slowly, quietly, “Do you think I could meet your mother sometime?”
She stiffened and he felt ice. Everything on her body grew hard, tense, and the way in which she answered was not panicky or terrified, but cold.
“Why would you ever want to do that?”
“Because we’re stuck. We can’t go forward until we’ve come to terms with this great weight you carry round with you everywhere you go. I feel I’m always in her company even though I’ve never met her. At least if I do, maybe we can work towards an answer.”
“She hates me,” she said simply. “That’s how she gets her life. That’s what she feeds on. She’s everything that makes you want to run away.”
“Then the only way to be rid of that fear is for me to come to terms with her.”
She pulled back so she could look at him. There was a touch of gold in her blue eyes, and their shape, faintly Eastern, touched him; but the eyes were closed to him now, everything that was soft in them turned off.
“I know what you’re going to say. I see why you say it.”
“Then why do you bring up exactly the thing I’ve come here to get away from?”
“Because I think she’s the part of you we have to look at and get past.”
“You mean the needy and pathetic part?”
“I mean the part that’s scared of its own beauty.”
She stopped at that, and turned away from him so all he could see was her hair, her back: in her, not the part that spoke of hope or vulnerability. Her back was rigid, chill; it was what was used to being pressed against the wall.
“I only mean that, as long as you keep her as this kind of monster you carry round inside you, she’ll always be there, and there’s nothing we can do with her. Or about her.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And your father’s not going to help us, from what you say.”
“My father’s perfectly happy as long as you leave him alone. All he wants is to be left in his own orbit.”
“Would it help, do you think, if I met him?”
She looked as if she’d just been through a sudden death.
“If you met him, you’d become part of them. You’d become everything I’m trying to avoid in my life.
“I think it’s hard for you to understand.” Her voice was softer now. “You don’t have a family. You’re off in your own world, on some kind of mountaintop, alone. I’m not. Everything I love, they try to destroy. Anything that makes me strong or independent, they want to take away. Once, when I was very small, I came home from school and I found that all my animals were gone. Every single one of them. My mother had gone into my room and put them in a trash bag and taken them away so I’d never see them again.”
“Because she worried you loved them more than you loved her.”
“I came back home, it was early afternoon—I was six or seven— and everything in the room was different. I asked Silvia—the woman who cleaned our house, my friend, the only one I trusted in the house—and she said she hadn’t been in my room at all. And then I knew that anything I tried to love, my mother would destroy. That the only way I could have a life was by shutting the door and pretending to care for nothing.”
He said nothing. He could say that California was the place where you could put the past behi
nd you, and that nothing need be as complicated as we like to make it seem. He could tell her of all the blessings of her childhood, in this privileged place far from all the Iranian had told them about his country. He could talk about the promise, the Sufi poets, and the feeling—she couldn’t deny—that there was a light running through everything, and that it was true as the dark.
But to do so would be to do what she could never forgive in him, and to bring out of her the mother who was in hiding. For what he couldn’t say to her was that the only times she described herself perfectly were when she talked about her mother; and that to call her mother “evil” or dark or irredeemable was to say some very dark things about herself. Better to assume the woman was just lonely and embittered and scared, frustrated with her life, and living through the only person she felt she could control—the daughter who took after her—than to say that the woman was a force of evil that nothing could cure.
The dialogue between them, though they never said it out loud, was a theological one, about possibility; and it hardly even seemed funny any more that the person from the Old World was the one who was telling the one from the land of promise that things could be improved. He thought of Kristina and realized that whatever was in Camilla came from Camilla and not her environment. And yet the notion—the part of her that feared being like her mother—was like one of the great boulders in the road that came down after a storm: as long as it was there, no one could move past it, forwards, and every time they reached a certain stage in the road going up, they’d have to turn back and go down once again. Into everything she feared.
He took the long way round to Sefadhi’s—a trick he’d learned from her, he thought—and as he made his way across the fields, he saw the students around him disassemble their lives and cast out from shore. Old now, in their nineteen years, they were ready to move on; the very street on which he lived was being pulled down, as a stage set might be, so that it could be made new again in the fall with the latest group of hopefuls. As the semester moved towards its close, and summer, young lovers wandered into something more serious, or splintered off and fell away; mattresses moved out into the streets again, and the boxes that had disappeared inside the makeshift apartments and lives started coming out again.
