by Iyer, Pico
Mas, en este abandono de los dos en los dos, ¿qué nos dábamos?; el brazo de la cruz de nuestro cruce, ¿qué flores y qué espinas del camino infinito recojía?
—JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
Behind it another card, picked up in Westwood, of a traditional wedding in Tehran, the bride and groom sitting before a mirror, each watching his own and the other’s reflection, the only thing beside them on their platform—and in the mirror—a small Quran placed upon a prayer rug.
And yet, in this abandonment of both in both, what did we give each other? In the arms of the cross of our crossing, what flowers and what thorns did it gather on the road without end?
You’re the most persuasive person I’ve ever met,” she said when, finally, she called, though she didn’t make it sound like a compliment.
“I don’t want to persuade you to do anything. Just offer up an opportunity.”
“You see—you’re smoother than a politician.”
“Point taken. I’ll shut up.”
There was a pause on the other end, as if she was waiting for more persuasion from his end.
“It’s a war zone over there.”
“They’re not fighting any longer. I wouldn’t take you to a place that wasn’t safe.” He thought of her neighborhood in Los Angeles, the beaten-down bungalows, the broken stores, but let it go.
“And all that money?”
“I’ve got to spend it somehow, on something connected to my project. Once we get there, it’s incredibly cheap.”
“Why me?”
“You know the answer to that. I wanted to do it even before I heard about your father.”
“You see what I mean? You could get me to jump off into the Grand Canyon.”
“Only if I had a safety net at the other end.” He kept silent about her mother, let her come slowly to the decision by herself.
“I don’t expect you to say anything now. But if we do go, it’d be best to go soon, before the New Year there. The only condition is that we have one talk beforehand.”
They met at the little Mexican cantina on the short road that led to the beach, where once they’d heard the German women, and Sting lying down in fields of gold. The same three men with their pomaded hair were strolling around the same six or seven tables, closing their eyes to the chorus of “La Cucaracha,” while the same woman with tired yellow hair slapped orders on the carousel. A girl of eight or so walked from table to table, selling roses.
“The same table as before,” she said, as they took their places in the garden. “Neutral ground.”
She looked better than when last they had met, as if she’d gone down into the Underworld and now had come back up into the light. She had a solidity about her, even a self-possession, that she’d always tried to hide before.
He ordered Coronas for them both, and then, as she fell into an uncertain silence, said, “Can you tell me something about him now?”
“You sound like a shrink.”
“Only a friend.”
She didn’t have much to tell, in any case. She’d never met any member of his family, she said, except a brother who’d always asked them to call him a “friend,” and not an uncle: her father hadn’t even wanted his daughters to take on his name, for a Persian male the ultimate act of sacrifice. The years of looking over one’s shoulder did not go away quickly.
“And that’s why you studied all those women travelers to Iran?”
“That’s why I almost didn’t. My parents didn’t want me to have anything to do with all of that.”
The little girl was at their table now, looking up at him with plaintive eyes, near-moist. He looked across at his companion, and then said no. The three men walked around in the small space, singing of doves and nightingales.
“And your mother?”
“What about her? She knew everything. But she kept it to herself. That’s how she is. It’s what she had on him. It’s what she had with him. It’s what she had that Krissie and I could never touch.”
“Did you learn much Farsi?” It was a way of sidling towards the manuscript.
“None,” she said, and he realized there was no way of ever knowing for sure. “My father freaked out even when I told him I was studying Isabelle Eberhardt and Freya Stark. ‘Englishmen’s Persia,’ he said. ‘All lies.’ ”
“And Kristina?”
Her face changed, and he saw what circumstances hadn’t erased in her. “Oh, Kristina could do anything. She was their golden girl; their pride and glory. She knew how to play them like an oud.” He felt the sting of all the words she’d taken pains not to use with him before.
“I got all the wayward genes,” she went on, as he dug at his enchilada, “the scared, insecure ones; she got him.”
He sipped his beer in silence, and waited to see if she’d go on.
“It’s nice here. It never changes.”
“It never will, so long as no one chic discovers it.”
“The undeveloped world,” she announced brightly. “That’s what they should call it. Not the ‘developing world,’ but the ‘undeveloped world,’ ” and when she said that, he knew she would come to Iran.
“Kristina’s the one who handles his legacy, then?”
“I guess. She was always the one who did his errands for him, went back and forth.”
“Khalil and so on?”
“I guess. They never told me much. But I know my father still had lots of friends over there, especially within the Shia community.”
Suddenly the foreign words came out, which for all this time she’d been so eager to keep away from him.
“And Sefadhi, too, must have been one of your father’s contacts?”
“Your adviser?” she said, and the pretense of innocence was so unconvincing, he realized it would be useless to ask more.
“I just felt”—he sipped at his beer—“or assumed, really, that that’s how you got the manuscript.”
“The manuscript’s different.”
Suddenly she seemed deeply interested in her rice.
“You’ve got to tell me something, Camel, if we’re going to take a trip together.”
“The manuscript belongs to me. That’s all you need to know. My mother doesn’t know about it, Kristina doesn’t know about it. It’s mine, and I gave it to you.”
He sipped his beer so she’d go on, but she seemed to have said her piece. The three men came to the climax of “Guantanamera”—the day’s last high note—and two teenagers in stained white shirts came out to begin stacking chairs.
“I don’t have a clue what the manuscript means, or even what it is. It’s beautiful, but I can’t work out its context.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said, looking at him as if she could hardly believe he could be so slow. “You understand why I gave it to you, don’t you?” Now that it was agreed she’d be coming, she didn’t have to be careful with him any more.
“I think I do.”
“It’s not as if I can afford a wedding ring.”
He looked down; somehow, with her, he’d always been worse than foolish.
“It’s not as if I expect wedding bells, you know.”
The place was closing around them, and they walked out into the dark.
V
There is a secret flight from Los Angeles to Tehran, across borders that are technically closed, to places that are officially unreachable. If you know how to work out the routings correctly, if you know how to read the papers in the right way, you can go to the Alitalia counter on a certain day, at a certain time, and there, above the check-in desk, is a small sign, no larger than a license plate, that says “TEHRAN, via Roma.”
There were people all around them when they arrived, banging large bags against their legs, moving in a cloud of Guerlain and Dior. Head scarves and tight jeans and excited teenagers carrying televisions or generators back to their loved ones at home. Around the huge departure hall (a mosque in reverse, he thought, looking at its large empty spaces), the muj
ahedin in their pressed suits were going from one startled group to another, showing them photographs of what the Second Revolution had wrought: the battered faces of dissidents, medieval instruments of torture.
He looked quickly to see how she was taking it in, and he saw apprehension, confusion, wariness; but also, what he hadn’t expected, hope. Her eyes were bright as she took her boarding pass from the woman behind the desk, and she moved more briskly than she ever did at home, as if on her way at last to one of the adventures she’d been reading of. When she asked him how Sefadhi had procured the visas so quickly—a “friend of a friend,” of course, in the Interests Section in Washington—he took care not to tell her how his final meeting with his adviser had gone.
“Is there anything I can bring back for you?” he’d asked his teacher, coming to collect the documents from his office.
“From Iran?” said Sefadhi. “What is there to bring back from Iran?”
Their connecting flight, when they arrived at Rome, was delayed for two days—some unspecified problem at Mehrabad—so they went into the city and caught the train to Venice. When they came out on the quay beside the Grand Canal, in the bright winter sunshine, Death suddenly loomed before them, shouting something out, and then danced away. Satan was by his side, sticking out his tongue at a Frenchwoman in thick furs. On the water, groups of harlequins were racing by, jumping up and down and calling out to visitors, and a Pierrot in the prow of a boat reached his hand under the skirts of what looked to be a courtesan. They’d wandered, without meaning to, into Carnevale.
It was Kevin’s thesis, and his own, all brought to vivid life (a woman in a gold gown sailed past, stately as a queen, a small gold mask held up to hide her eyes): the pagan, animist spirit that hides out inside even the most modern of places. But it was something else, too, more unsettling. Everything you know about us is wrong, the Lenten costumes said. Underneath what you see is another layer, and underneath that, still another.
They made their way to St. Mark’s, turned down a small alleyway where he’d been told a Moslem building still hid out, and as they did, a skeleton lurched up to her, leered, and said something unintelligible before vanishing again. On every side of them, women in black and scarlet costumes, outlandish, and jesters, zanies, figures from a devil’s medieval banquet. At Halloween, he thought, we play at being monsters for a night; here the characters seemed to suggest that we are in fact monsters who play at being human.
They walked along thin lanes, over arched bridges in the hesitant light, their breath coming up to greet them and halo them in the cold, and as they walked they passed groups of contemplative birds, a man whose face was chalky white. Dante was over here, talking to some ghost, and Casanova over there, arm in arm with what might have been Beatrice (or a secretary, in her waking hours). After dark, they went to a far corner of the city—someone had slipped a flyer into her hands, and when they’d opened it up, they’d found not the advertisement they’d expected, but directions to what seemed to be a private party. But when they got to the house marked with a scowling face, there was no number on the door, no sign. He knocked, and there was no answer.
She pushed at the door, and it gave, and they were inside a dark, narrow corridor—close and hot—with phantoms, clowns, and courtiers pushing in on them from every side, everyone turned inside out, as if they had become all that they dreamed of becoming—all that they feared to become—the other fifty-one weeks of the year. A demon was crouching in one corner, where a woman was laughing huskily, the larger woman above her dressed so you could see nothing of her but her breasts. The bodies pressed in on one another in the crowded space, intimate, suffocating, warm, and there was an overpowering smell of wine, perfume, something else.
They passed into another room and saw, at its far end, in the near dark, a skull above a door. “Follow the skull,” whispered a voice who must have guessed they were foreign from their costumes. “Always follow the skull.” They did so—she leading him now (strangely invulnerable in her cat-faced mask, and the long black cloak they’d rented from the sad man in the shop that afternoon)—and inside this farther space there was virtually no light. Men became women, became men again; a character who seemed to have stepped out of one of the Bosch canvases they’d seen at the Duomo came and planted a kiss on her cat’s mouth, then reached for him. A man all in black handed her a card, and she said, “Come on. Let’s go farther.”
When they got to the next room, pitch-black, someone snatched her away from him, and he was alone in a crush of shapes and moans. From every side could be heard gasps of some kind (was that her?), and mutterings, unclaspings. A hand reached for his belt, began to untether it; someone else was breathing on his neck, and moving up towards his ear. He heard a sigh—it could have been her—and then the hands were creeping up under his shirt, reaching for his wallet, and he broke away (there was a curse), and flung himself back into the previous room, the one before that, out again into the corridor, where King Ludwig was peering down the dress of a woman whose face was deathly white.
Then out again, past the last few figures, into the dark, where he leaned down, hands on knees, to catch his breath in the cold. A cat was waiting for him in the dark, and she took his hand and led him back down the long silent lane, past the locked doors, towards the center of town.
“It’s almost like we’re walking through your poems,” she said, softly, for they were lost, and they felt like intruders at a private show.
“I don’t think so,” he said, still rattled from the party. A couple was under lamplight, circling around each other in the brief light. There was the sound of heavy drapery falling away from somewhere, a sharply taken breath. “It’s not higher selves, just different ones.”
The dervishes in Los Angeles—he didn’t need to remind her—hadn’t needed costumes to make themselves something different.
When they got to St. Mark’s again, they found a warm spot in one corner—the fellowship didn’t extend to a hotel room in Venice—and sat amidst the debris. An hour or so later, the sun began at last to come up above the canal, and they saw figures emerging out of doorways, or stepping out from boats, like actors coming out to take their final bows at the end of an all-night performance. One or two were dressed as Moslem holy men, or Moors from centuries before.
They took a boat back to the station—the colonnades of St. Mark’s echoing and empty—and as they went along the canal, saw figures in wigs, women with moles painted on their cheeks, laughing and kissing passionately, while a man in black sat at the back of a lonely boat as if being led across the Styx on the last journey he’d ever take. On the station platform again—tourists in thick sweaters hugging themselves against the chill—he looked back at the shivering reflections in the water, and wondered how it could ever become something different.
“What do you think it’ll be like a week from now?”
“More confetti on the square.”
“We move on and on, in search of mystery,” he wrote on the plane, while she slept, “and then we come to see that the only mysteries we want are the ones we’ll never solve. And all we can do is try to cage with reasons what we know to be beyond the scope of reason. Till at last we surrender to something beyond us, and become unknowable ourselves.”
It was pure madness, a part of him knew, all the more so since his thesis had been not so much completed as abandoned.
As the pilot made his announcement of their imminent arrival, she stirred, and he followed her gaze out to what seemed to be utter darkness, broken by the great lights of a building they recognized as the Khomeini shrine. Beyond it, the fainter lights of the city going on and on till they ended in emptiness again, and darkness. “It really is a desert,” she said, marveling, as if she’d never believed it until now. “Like L.A. Except the lights are all turned out in parts.”
When they stepped out of the terminal—the scowling guards having waved them through—the winter cold slapped them in the face, and as they lurched towards th
e center of the city, and the mountains to the north, the taxi driver said that it was only truly Nowruz, New Year, when the snow had melted on the slopes. The hotel that was waiting for them was bare and cold—heating another of the luxuries apparently banned by the Revolution—and as soon as the door was locked behind them, he jumped into her bed for warmth. For superstition’s sake, they’d taken two beds instead of one.
Out in the street the next day, the cars coughing on all sides—the Shah’s most audible legacy—he had the sense of being lost inside a maze. Belching trucks and constant horns, and over everything a sense of grime, or chaos, as if the city itself were wearing old black clothes that hadn’t been cleaned in years; and deeper than the disorder, a sense of constant apprehension. The people around them were all dressed in brown or black, as if to mock the comparisons with Los Angeles, and he thought of the men he’d seen in Damascus, their fraying shirts and moth-eaten jackets giving a poignancy to their talk of revolution.
“I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for,” she said, and he realized she wasn’t talking only of taxis; it was impossible to find anything in the town, and even the mountains by which they’d been told they could orient themselves were often hard to make out in the smog, brown over black over brown.
“Even not to find something might be something,” he said, and she looked back at him strangely, though not without affection.
As they waited and waited for a car, a woman came up to them, and said something to her in a Farsi so colloquial he couldn’t make it out. Then another woman, as if emboldened, came up and handed her an orange. A few children came over to inspect the aliens, and a third woman, eager perhaps to show off her English, came and started asking them questions, or translating the questions of the others. “How long have you been married? How many children do you have? Why do you come here?”
He gave them answers, as the official leader of the party, but the women were mostly looking at her, smiling or gesturing as if to make some contact. An old lady stopped and plucked at the fabric of her coat, as if to remark on its quality. Another one motioned at her scarf, as if to say they were all in this together.
