Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  It was like, he realized now, being lost inside a piece of music, but one in which there was no melody or rhythm he could make out. And the more he tried to escape, the more he was lost at its heart. “I help you, sir?” “You buy from me?” “Your wife, sir? You want for your wife?” “My sister, sir. My uncle. My friend.”

  “Quite a long excursion,” she’d said when at last he’d found his way back, attaching himself to a pair of Germans who’d had the sense to bring a guide with them. “Got in deeper than you thought?”

  Against her ancestral manner he was always helpless. Even the earrings he’d picked up from the Germans’ expensive hotel looked hollow now.

  “Very nice. Though you still haven’t told me what you were doing all this time.”

  “Looking for these.”

  “Of course. What else would you be up to?”

  Another of the moments to match, like a pendant, the early morning in Istanbul.

  When he went back to his desk now, he knew where he was going. “Camilla,” he said, after picking up the phone, dialing the number that led to her answering machine in Los Angeles. “I did open your present, and I’m astonished. I don’t know what to say. Honestly, I’m speechless in every way. Can you tell me anything about it?”

  It was useless waiting for her call—she might not get the message for weeks, and even if she did, she might rejoice in his discomfort. The person who responded to him might be in hiding, or (this was Camilla) might have become someone quite different. Wanting to feel he was doing something, he drew out a long piece of clean paper, and wrote.

  Nigel:

  Can you help me with something? Something stupid. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I want to make contact with someone, in Spain, and, for reasons that are complicated but not entirely dishonest, I don’t want him to know I’m contacting him from California. I know it sounds utterly mad, but take it from me that it’s what this mad field entails.

  So could you please just sent the attached fax—a cover letter, and these four pages of poems—to him, as from yourself, and ask him to reply to you? If he sets the Revolutionary Council on you, I’ll make it up in some way to Arabella.

  Thank you, really and truly: whatever you want from California will be yours, and I’ll still be in your debt.

  Warmest wishes,

  John

  Then, lighting his candle again, and drawing out the book, he returned to the desert. It felt as if night winds were blowing around the flimsy house, perched so precariously at the edge of the cliff— “the far edge of the world,” as he’d once called it to Nigel—that it was all he could do to keep himself upright. The nightly ritual under candelight began to seem some private act of worship, performed each night for a God he couldn’t name.

  The drunk in the street

  Sees two bottles where there is only one.

  This drunk in my house

  Sees one bottle where there are two.

  You say you are in love,

  But all I see is you.

  True lovers become flame,

  Become smoke, become ash.

  These ones, if possible, seemed even more resistant than the earlier ones, more knotty; there was less and less of Rumi—or of obvious Rumi—as the book proceeded, and he thought of a ship passing through headlands and then moving out into the open sea. He was being drawn deeper and deeper into what he couldn’t understand— as if someone was deliberately drawing him on, placing a familiar sign, a well-known quatrain, just at the place where he might be tempted to give up. And so leading him farther and farther into the light of what he didn’t understand.

  Had Rumi not written sixty-five thousand couplets in his intoxication, had concordances not all been in a Farsi that was still something of a stretch for him, perhaps he could have turned to a source in the library—or at least a foreign library—and quickly isolated the poems that were known to be by the master. But he didn’t have the resources for that, or the time, and something else told him that to attempt to unriddle the meaning of the book in that way would be a kind of profanation—like making word counts of the Bible.

  Leave yourself at home,

  The Beloved has no need of you.

  Who does he want to see?

  No one.

  The poems were growing more curdled, more obscure: farther and farther from the rounded clarity of Rumi, which made him think now of the richly painted low doors of Damascus in the near dark. The phone on his desk was the only silent thing in the room. “You’re far away even when we’re in the same room,” she’d said once, on his sofa. “You remove yourself inwardly, I remove myself physically. It comes to the same thing.”

  In the morning, when he awoke—or pulled himself out of a crowded and confused sleep—he saw a piece of paper hanging out of his fax machine, and tore it out.

  Dear Mr. Nigel Carpenter,

  I thank you for your enquiry of this afternoon. I further thank you for thinking to solicit my opinion as what you so orientally call the “leading expert in this ancient field.” I read the poems you sent and feel obliged to tell you that the book you have discovered, if this is an indication of its contents, is worthless. These are pathetic falsehoods that mock the work they steal. You will notice, for example, in the third one, that the poet writes like a copy of the great Sufi, yet his “turning,” his “drinking,” and his “love” have the stink of the daily. They take what is sacred and make it cheap.

  I regret this bluntness and hope you understand that honesty is better than politeness in such a matter. I hope you will not trouble anyone else with these copyist’s works. They are foolish things that laugh at the originals.

  I do not know your name and I do not know where or how you study. I have every reason not to answer your fax at all. If I do so, it is only to ask you please to desist from what you are doing. For us, these poems are holy works. They do not need your coquetry.

  Sincerely,

  René Guzmán Espinoza

  You are the violation of my vows,

  My apostasy, my faith.

  I shatter myself and you,

  I bend to pick up the pieces.

  You move me

  Out of stasis.

  I see your reflection in the mirror.

  I can’t tell me from you.

  No, no closer.

  Stay away!

  Already you are as close to me

  As the fire to the flame.

  He was getting sloppy, or tired, dead to the meanings and their echoes. “Out of stasis” meant almost nothing. And what was the difference between “fire” and “flame”? They were defeating him in some way, and he was losing hold: in the walls of a foreign city yet unknown.

  Asleep, and being comforted by a cool breeze,

  Suddenly, I saw a grey dove

  Soar above the trees and sob with longing;

  In her anguish, I heard my own.

  As if to tease him again, just as he neared the end, the verse of the Andalusian poet that Rumi cites, as if to throw everything into question once again.

  The poem should have been the last one in the book—it looked as if it had been deliberately placed on the final page, as both summary and final testament, the way, he thought, when he was very young, they played “God Save the Queen” at the end of the cartoons his father took him to on Saturday afternoons. So that, on heading out of the theater, people would be thinking of their majesty—the might of Empire—and not the alien myths of Hollywood.

  In this case, though, on the final page, which was traditionally left blank, or inscribed only with a glyph of some kind, a coded indication of the calligrapher’s identity, there was one final poem, and it was an odd one to put at the end of the collection, for it was one of the least suggestive. The words were thick and blunt—he thought of nails being hammered into a coffin—and were quite without the mystery, the aroma even, that gave the other poems their potency. There was no talk of “fire” or “wine” or “turning,” none of the ambiguity
that allowed the other poems to wear veils and be many things at once; these words were almost militantly prosaic. As if, perhaps, they were a challenge thrown out to the translator, to try to make something out of words that were entirely without shade and texture. Or maybe a reminder that he could only be a vessel, a transmission. There was as little space for him as for a French translator of “The cat sat in the hat.”

  My hand

  Your hand

  Connected

  Over

  His hand.

  No division in

  Our hearts.

  He wrapped the book in its towel again, got up from his desk, and, walking down the few steps that led to the beach, felt more alone than in all his years in California.

  He had never credited her with cunning: part of what was so refreshing about her, to someone from an older world, was her transparency, feelings passing across her face like clouds across a pond. Even her most elaborate devices—the heavy-handed mentioning of “Greg,” the times she’d answer a question by hiding behind a pun—seemed as guileless as a little girl’s. And yet now, somehow, she had performed a master stroke, made him captive to her, or passed on, by some curious osmosis, her sense of anxiety and guardedness: as if, through her gift, she’d made him feel as lost and without center as she sometimes seemed to be.

  He took the book to the bank the next day, keeping the four pages of photocopies he’d sent to Cádiz, and when he took out a safety-deposit box for it, the woman asked him for a code word by which he could identify himself in future. “Camilla,” he said without thinking, and she looked up surprised. “A friend’s name?” “No,” he said, “just my own name rearranged.”

  He had to get moving, though: the deadline was closer than ever now, and his thesis had been forgotten. If he didn’t force his mind in another direction, the lines would keep going round and round indefinitely. You are the violation of all my vows. Beside you I’m beside myself. Leave yourself at home.

  After his morning run, he showered quickly and got in the car, driving south. He went along the coast, as if something was pulling him back: he passed the bikers’ bar from the night when she’d brought him back from the airport, and then he passed the line of beach houses, where they’d lain one night under the stilts. For days after, every time he took off his shoes or jeans, grains of sand would come trickling out.

  At Santa Monica, he drove up to Wilshire and followed it all the way to Westwood, and when he turned onto the smaller street, it was as if he were back a year before: old men at little tables on the sidewalk, the same men as before, perhaps, their glasses of tea before them, with cubes of sugar at their side. “Happy Nowruz” on many of the shopwindows, though the Persian New Year was now many months behind them, and Farsi newspapers blowing across the side-walks. L.A. was turning more and more into a desert city where tribes assembled with their exotic goods, converging from all directions, and traded their special keepsakes for those of other groups.

  He parked on a side street and walked back along Ohio to the main boulevard. He walked down to where 9763 should have been—had been a year before—and couldn’t find it. He walked up again, and back, here and there registering landmarks from his previous trip, and there was nothing. Where the bookshop had been— Islamic Arts—there seemed to be a mock-fifties diner, the New World Café. He went in and some Asian kids greeted him, looking blank when he said something about Iran.

  On the same block, a few shops away, there was another bookstore, which he thought he remembered from before: the child’s drawing books in the window, the flamenco guitar, the stack of Farsi dictionaries. When he went in, he was in a version of the place he’d been before, though some of the props had changed. As before, the man on duty, vigilant as a bouncer, came up and asked him what he wanted.

  “Just looking,” he said.

  “Our books are all in Persian.”

  “Midounam,” he replied in the man’s language, and enjoyed a temporary victory.

  “Our books are for people from Iran,” the shopkeeper pressed on, as if he had stepped into a mosque without the faith.

  “I know that. That’s why I came here. I have these”—he pulled out a page from his photocopies—“and thought someone might be interested.”

  “What is this?”

  “It’s something I’ve found. I was told this was the place where a master might be able to help me.” He was bluffing, of course, but the man couldn’t turn him away now.

  “Come,” he said, anxious to put the matter into other hands. “I show you my uncle.”

  At the back of the store—overlit aisles of magazines and knickknacks, as before—was a small office, where a man with little hair and a generous belly was laboring over his accounts. He looked up when the cashier led him in.

  “Yes?”

  “I know you’re very busy, but I wanted your advice.” Foreigners play the supplicant in Iran. “I have these poems”—he passed over the page of photocopies—“that a friend, from Tehran, gave me, and I don’t know what they mean. Can you help me?”

  The man looked at the paper, ignoring everything he said, and looked closer: the level of craftsmanship clearly impressed him.

  “This only?”

  “No. These, too.” Deliberately, he handed over the other three pages he’d brought. The man looked at them, went through them again, looked some more.

  “This is Rumi,” he said. “Only a book of Rumi.”

  “The first poem, I know, is his. But the others I cannot find in the collections.”

  The man was silenced. He looked at them again.

  “So—you are wanting to sell?”

  “At this point, only advice.”

  “Why do I give advice so you can get money? It doesn’t help me.” He realized, abruptly that the positions were precisely reversed from the previous year. This man was saying to him what he had said to the man’s neighbor.

  “I only wanted an evaluation.”

  “Without the whole book, I value nothing.” Except the man had already told him all he needed to know by not dismissing the poems instantly. Clearly, he was dealing with something of significance.

  He went out again into the mid-morning sunlight, and, recalling where he’d gone from here the last time he visited, he drove across town again, to the house he’d seen from the Chandler novels. There was no sign of her anywhere inside, though—no sign of life of any kind; the weeds in the garden were taller than they’d been before, and when he peered in through the unclosed curtain, at the painting on the wall, it didn’t seem to be a tiger this time, but a deer, perhaps an Islamic gazelle.

  “It’s like you’re looking at a stained-glass window from the wrong side,” she’d said once about his studies. “In broad daylight. You’re seeing the same thing the people inside the church are seeing, but it’s completely different.”

  Back in the car, he started driving back across the hills to Santa Barbara, and as he did so, he decided what he should do: he’d apply for an extension to the fellowship, leave it with Eileen in Sefadhi’s absence, and then go off in search of someone who could identify with his predicament. Mysteriously, a friendly face came to mind, a slap on the back, a hearty greeting, and when he returned to the little house by the sea, he went straight to the desk and called India.

  “Hello? Yes? Hello?” The immemorial confusion seeped into his room over the international phone lines, and then the sound of someone muttering, perplexed, and then slamming the phone down. He dialed again—“All circuits are busy”—and then again: the whine of a fax machine. He gave it five minutes, and on the fourth try he got what sounded like Hussein’s private secretary, and then, suddenly, from another instrument, a boom that might have come from early Evelyn Waugh.

  “Hello, Mr. Hussein. It’s John Macmillan—yes, I’m sure you remember—and the reason I’m calling is that I have a manuscript of my own now, at least something in my hands, and I remembered you told me about an evaluator . . .”

  It ha
rdly mattered what he said, since Hussein couldn’t make out most of it in any case, and was now shouting back, “You are here in Jaipur? Now? Please, you must be my guest, I’ll tell . . .”

  At last he got his message across, and Hussein said, “Of course, I’d be honored to be of assistance. I’ll ask Ahmed to fax you the details.”

  Next morning, when he awoke, there was a name and number in Paris.

  One of his students had told him, years before, about the courier system—fly across the Atlantic for next to nothing—and on the fourth day of his vigil, he got an assignment, and boarded the United flight for Paris, armed with nothing but his small black carry-on and the parcel given him by the company. He felt curiously like a spy— Sefadhi’s story now came back to him—and after he’d handed over his unknown booty to a man at the other end, he took a bus into the heart of the city. It was raining, as it always seemed to be here, and when he found the place he remembered from before, the man said, “I am so sorry. Without a reservation, there is only a room for two.” Too perfectly, he found himself in the same room he’d once shared with Martine. High up, on the top floor, amidst the gulls on the grey rooftops, the windows of the garret across from him where now a woman sat applying her mascara, and a little girl tinkled away at a piano. A rooftop is a basement in reverse, he thought: an angel’s place for hiding things.

  At dusk, after a long sleep, he went out into the Jardin du Luxembourg, and stopped for coffee and pastries at the place where they’d gone for a final treat. She’d been blinking a lot, as if to pretend she wasn’t upset. “It’s almost as if you only trust what you can explain. It should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?”