by Iyer, Pico
The bus stopped at regular intervals, to let people off, to take new passengers on, and then they were in the desert again, no coordinates or signs for as far as they could see. Miles of emptiness and sand, and then the darkness began to fall, and they were in a place even farther from orientation or real life. The night outside unbroken by lights or trucks or dust storms. He looked out into the blackness till the night made her fall asleep, and then he, too, was asleep, woke up, fell asleep again, till suddenly there came a decisive jolt and the bus stopped moving altogether. He looked outside but could see nothing: the same night as before.
“What’s happening?” she said, as she woke up, too.
“I don’t know. We seem to have stopped.”
“What’s going on?”
From behind them came a great clattering, and then the other passengers began moving through the aisle and out into the dark. They stayed where they were, not knowing what was going on, and then, after a few minutes, they felt the bus being pushed on its side, almost as if it was about to be overturned.
“What’s happening?” she said again, the panic rising as he felt them off-balance, and then the bus landed on all fours again.
“I don’t know. It must be some kind of problem.”
“I know it’s a problem. But what’s going on?”
Around them the bus began rocking again, back and forth, as if the passengers were going to push it over, with them inside it. Then silence again, and nothing but the dark.
They remained where they were—to go out, into the foreign cold, seemed even more dangerous than staying in their seats—and then, at last, a man came in and said, “Excuse me. Broken. Tomorrow, Shiraz.”
He motioned for them to follow him, and they went out into the dark, their bags heavy in the night, to see the other passengers standing around or sitting in the emptiness while a couple of boys argued about something on the axle. It was cold, and there was nowhere to go in the dark.
A little later, as mysteriously as everything else here, a car arrived, and the man motioned for them to come with him, and they began jouncing away from the bus. After twenty minutes or so, they arrived at a small, empty square, with houses (or huts, really) on every side. It was silent as a ghost town. The man—the designated English-speaker, they gathered—went up to a door and knocked, and then there was another face there, and they were being led into a narrow, unlit corridor. A door was opened, and the man pointed them into a room as empty as a cell. He made the universal gesture of sleeping, then disappeared.
It was a small space, with a pile of stones in one corner, and a rolled-up carpet in another. Through the window came the moon above the small houses, the sound of the wind from the desert, the cold.
“I don’t like it,” she said, walking around as if to find some piece of consolation.
“I know. But I don’t think we’ve got much choice.”
“I thought you spoke good Farsi.”
“When I’m at home, perhaps, with my books.”
They sat against a bare wall, and the wind rose up again outside. He put his arm around her, she tried to sleep. But every time she stirred, he started from his sleep. Every time he woke up from a brief dream, she did, too. The night went on and on, and the first light never seemed to come.
When he awoke, with a start, in the morning, it was to see the man from the night before bending over them, motioning urgently at his watch. She struggled up, face pale, and he saw, as he looked at her, that something had gone out of her in the night: she was the person she was in California, haunted, and more vulnerable than ever now that she was far from everything she knew.
“You’re okay?” he said when they were ushered into the car. She nodded, but it was as if some guardian spirit in her had gone away; she’d seen the other side of her father’s legacy. At the bus, a boy hurried up to them with two dirty glasses of tea and a handful of crumbling biscuits; they looked around and realized that their fellow passengers had spent the whole night here, sleeping in the sand if they slept at all. Everyone got back in now, and the bus started up, as if it were the beginning of a new journey. But she said almost nothing in answer to his questions, and looked out of the window dazed.
When they got to Shiraz, he got a room for them in the best hotel in town, and found a Buick to take them around, but at some level it was all too late; she hardly even smiled when the boys near the university, fluent in their English, chattered away, and one of them opened a book to show them a sentence translated into their own language: “Truth shows her face, her very beautiful face, in a veil. Only the travelers who go to other places can see her.” The mystical sentiments of the coming man, Khatami.
“We’ll go back tomorrow,” he said, once they were back in the safety of the hotel. “Take the bus back to Tehran, find a room for the night in Qom, and take the next flight out.”
The Revolution had given a kind of luster to romance, a secret charge, by pushing it underground, and in the hours before it was dark, when they went to Hafez’s tomb, they found it was more full of courting couples than it might have been a generation before. The boys and girls sat here and there on the grass, eating rosewater ice cream, and now and then a pair would go up to the small, serene white pavilion and tell their futures there.
“You want to try?”
“I guess.” She could never resist a game, he knew; and when he handed her one of the books behind the tomb of the mystical poet, she closed her eyes and flipped through the pages, then jammed a finger down.
“A little farther. You’re between the lines.”
She pushed her finger down, and he said, “There. You’re on a sentence now.”
She opened her eyes. “What does it say?”
“It says”—he paused, perhaps for effect, or because the Farsi was difficult—“it says, ‘The adventure between me and my Beloved never ends. What has no beginning can have no end.’ ”
She looked at him. “How do I know you’re not making it up?”
“You don’t. You have to trust me.”
The next morning, when he awoke, it was to see her, once again, at the window, as if she were tracing with her mind the streets her father might have gone down when young. And, in the process, putting away whatever had frightened her in the empty room.
“I’m still really glad we came,” she said, not turning to look at him, as if that would break the spell. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
He’d expected bad dreams in the night, a sudden reappearance of the figure in black who’d terrified her before; he’d half expected something like the last night with Martine, in Athens, and the voice that wanted to destroy everything. But she’d slept without a sound all night, and now, as she turned back from the window, he had the sense (which he couldn’t, wouldn’t say to her) that she’d stepped through her fear, at some level, and come out on the other side.
The bus that took them back through the desert led them through a wasteland they thought they knew by now, a signless emptiness that hadn’t changed, it was easy to imagine, since the flame was lit in Yazd, fifteen hundred years before; and as the sun began to fail, he could see no sign of habitation or relief. Soon it was dark and the bus was just snores, small stirrings in the dark. Outside, very occasionally, the lights of a small mosque, a passing truck.
He slept, she slept, each of them woke up at broken intervals, and then, when it was still dark, the bus suddenly stopped, and he looked outside to see nothing still.
“It’s happening again,” she said, fingers tightening around the wrist she’d been secretly holding under his cloak. He couldn’t say it wasn’t. The passengers behind them stirred and then, as before, proceeded down the aisle and went out into the dark.
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are. It’s okay.”
“I’m really scared.”
“They don’t want to hurt us, I’m sure.”
He got up and went out to see what was happening, and then, coming back,
motioned for her to follow him. Outside, though the first light wasn’t even visible above the mountains, the other passengers were stretched out in the sand, heads pointed in the same direction. The day’s first call to prayer.
Her eyes were full.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, and then went back to her seat alone.
Qom arrived in a great crackle of activity, men in black with white turbans moving this way, moving that, while others, whose black turbans marked them out as descendants of the Prophet, chatted away in groups, or hurried off towards their classes. Doves flew between the minarets, and they felt as if they’d stumbled into some medieval Oxford where the issues of the thirteenth century were debated as fiercely as if they were the issues of the day (as, perhaps, they were). The vultures, the blue jays of the desert, were far behind them now, in this old city of black gowns and earnest students, figures disappearing in the direction of the golden dome at its center, through an entrance that foreigners (a sign said in English) were not allowed to use.
They took a couple of seats at a café—she took out some coins and put them in a box with a dove on it (alms for the poor)—and a sullen waiter came and thrust down a plate of sohun, the saffronflavored pistachio brittle for which the city has long been famous.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. She’d seemed better since their departure from Shiraz: the long drive through the desert, the unexpected stop, the prayers—and, especially, the tears—seemed to have cleared something out in her.
“Full. Exhausted. Spent.”
“Different from before you ever came?”
“In some ways. This place doesn’t have anything to do with me, the way I thought it did. But in another way, it has.”
“It isn’t a foreign country.”
“It is. But not in the way I thought it would be.”
“It’s part of you, don’t you think?”
She shook her head no. “I’ll block it out when I’m home, the way I’ve always blocked it out. But at least I’ll know it isn’t black. It’s . . .” She gave up the search for the perfect word.
Around them people were snatching up pictures of Khomeini, copies of the tapes of lectures he’d given years before.
“He used to live here,” he said, telling her as ever what she was likely to know already.
“He still does,” she said, and he was silent: she was right. The Ayatollah’s furious stare met them everywhere they looked.
“Hello, my friends,” said a voice nearby, and he turned away from the street to see a man dressed from head to toe in black, like a cleric. “You are from Germany, I think?”
“Denmark,” he said, picking up the fiction they’d agreed upon before coming.
“Copenhagen, very good,” said the boy (or man: it was hard to read his age). He followed their gaze out to where they’d been looking, at the figures disappearing into the narrow, flat-roofed maze around the mosque.
“You have your passports?” he said, with what could have been idle curiosity or something else.
“No. They have to keep them in the hotel.”
“Of course.” The stranger smiled. “You will join us for some tea?”
He looked across at her, and realized from her face that she, too, knew that they were trapped: whoever this unsought figure was, there was no way of getting away from him. If they left, he’d say he wanted to come, too; if they returned to the hotel, he’d ask to see their passports there.
“Why not?”
The “us,” it soon became apparent, was only a courtesy: the boy had been trained, in issuing invitations, to avoid the impious “I.” He was a star student, they guessed, who accompanied his elders to conferences abroad; he’d studied in Belgrade (hence the English), and now was savoring the chance to practice on some new victims (and to check up on them at the same time).
“We’re actually leaving in the morning,” she volunteered, playing up the Danish accent. The boy looked pointedly at her, as if to include her in the conversation.
“You don’t trust me,” he said suddenly.
They were taken aback; it was like being outmaneuvered at chess. Debating was still one of the skills they taught here; Khomeini was only the prize student among generations of such arguers.
“I take you to my house,” the boy now volunteered, as if he’d come to some decision. “You would like to see it?”
“We’re not allowed,” he improvised quickly. “There’s a sign.”
“You are with me,” said the boy. “I am—how do you call it?— Coordinator for the New Principles of Islam.” The pride with which he recited the phrase was a small reassurance, but her face was pale again, and as soon as the boy disappeared, as if to prepare for their visit, she started talking to him under her breath.
“We don’t know who he is.”
“I realize that.”
“He could be anyone. Why’s he so interested in us?”
“He may just be courteous.”
She looked at him as if he really were a child.
“I only think that . . .” He didn’t need to finish. If they didn’t take this chance, his silence said, something in them would never be put to rest. It had all come down to this one moment: the simple question of whether they trusted the boy in black.
“You’ll look after me?”
“With my life.”
The boy returned now, smiling, and they followed him out, tentatively, into the square. As he led them into the forbidden city, men in black passed on every side, sometimes stealing a glance at this foreigner in secular dress, or the figure beside him, pale, they could see, even with her headdress on. They moved like newspaper sentences in a holy book. “This is really okay?” she asked, but the boy was moving quickly, with a foreign air of purpose, down one lane, then another.
At last they came to a small black door. The boy opened it, and then climbed up a dark flight of stairs—Isfahan again—to what looked to be a small, dark cell. From outside came the sound of argument.
“You will drink some tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“You would like some tea?”
“No. We’re fine.”
“You will join me in some tea?”
“Thank you,” he said, registering the ritual of the three-part refusal, and the boy went out, returning very soon with three glasses of tea, a plate of figs.
“You are a teacher in your country?” the boy said as they sipped the tea.
“In Denmark,” he said heavily, “my wife is a teacher. I am—well, actually, I am a student of Sufi poetry.” It was clearly the most dangerous answer he could have given.
“You are interested in Islam?” said the boy, newly alert.
“A little. Saadi. Rumi. We went to Hafez’s tomb yesterday.”
“You are a good friend of Islam,” said the boy, with what intention he couldn’t tell; the town was old enough to entertain many levels of irony.
“And you?” To redirect the questioning.
“Shiraz,” said the boy. “Mother, father in Shiraz.”
“But you’re here for good now?”
“God willing,” said the boy.
They braved the figs, the bitter tea; there seemed no more to say.
“For what reason do you study Islam?” the boy tried again, his directness so sharp it could have been that of a spy (or of someone so guileless he didn’t know he sounded like a spy).
“I like the ideas about surrender. Giving up.” The boy looked confused. “ ‘Die before you die,’ ” he said, quoting the Prophet’s reputed maxim in Farsi.
“You speak our language.”
“Not really. Just a little.”
Nobody said anything for a few moments, and he began to think that it was time to make an exit. He looked across at her to give a sign, and suddenly she spoke up.
“You should show our new friend what you’ve brought with you.”
“He wouldn’t be interested.”
“Sh
ow him. He may be able to help you.”
“What is this?” said the boy, curiosity aroused. “What do you have?”
“Nothing,” he said, but she spoke up for him. “He has some poems he wants somebody to look at.”
The boy looked at him expectantly.
He pulled the worn copies out of his pocket, the creased pages so crumpled and bent over that they were almost impossible to read. They’d been on his person so long they seemed to be a part of him. Then, very slowly, he handed them over.
The boy looked at the pages for a long time and said nothing. Finally, turning back to the first, the third, he said, “These are from Jalaluddin? Mathnawi?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. Someone gave them to me in California. I don’t know what they are.”
The boy looked at them again, turning from page to page, careful not to tear the old pages. Then, at last, he handed them back again.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Some. Some I don’t like.”
“Do you think they’re authentic?”
The boy looked back at him, his English overtaxed.
“I mean, do you think they’re real?”
“Of course they are real. They are here.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right.” He looked over to her to indicate they should take their leave of him, and saw a Camilla who looked new: transfigured, somehow, in this unfamiliar place, radiant and at peace.
“Do you think they’re old?” he said, as they got up to leave.
The boy got up too and said, “The feeling is true. You cannot have an old feeling.”
“You’re right,” he said again. “Thank you for the tea, for showing us your room.”
“I show you only my room. You show me the light of God.”
The answer was so genuine it shamed him, mocking his petty thoughts with its reference to what the poems meant, and the light that was their message.
Then, as they were walking to the door, the boy stopped again, as if he had been struck by something.
“I know who wrote those poems,” he said.
