Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Bakh—” Wert says. It’s much the same face, except for the sunglasses, which are on a table to Bakhtiary’s right. He had wanted the people here to be looking at him. They’ll be able to search his face for hours on end; he has the advantage of being a photograph. Any secrets are jewels inside him, safe. All the girl’s jewels are on the outside—hung between her eyes from a headband, in her ears, at her bare wrists and throat. She’s in Western dress, one of those wisps for summer, but grasps a shawl awkwardly round her shoulders. The small nose has the downward-curving septum, just right for a ring, but it too is bare. Her eyes are cast down though, on Bakh.

  “She is first time out of chador,” Fereydoun says, falsetto. Perhaps he can’t whisper. “Ah. Madame.”

  They must have lined themselves up under the screen just before Wert entered. In the center is a long row of women of all ages, brilliantly dressed. In front of these are the children, party-dressed also. Behind the women, garbed in their black-white as if for a graduation day, as if they haven’t moved since he last saw their country, stand the men. All bow formally. When Madame moves, the lines break up. In spite of the men’s Swiss watches and Italian silk suits and the women’s spicy French aura, it flashes on him what this group is. Perhaps it’s the two young women with babies on their hips. Or that screen, high above them like a colored sail. They are immigrants.

  Madame comes forward, robin-breasted in her purple sweater set, on the pouty legs which for Wert link all European women from Finisterre to Leningrad, except for the Swedes. Wert knows when a hand is extended royally. The hand he kisses is boneless in that peculiar way. Incurved, almost vestigial, it must never have done more than fold a napkin or slip on a ring; it may never have buttoned for itself or forced on a boot. Its exercise? Perhaps holding a sheaf of playing cards. He avoids the big pearl on it as he would a royal mouth.

  An hour later, still seated at Madame’s side, after as many innuendos as there are nuts in the dishes scattered everywhere, he’s exhausted but has learned a good deal, though not yet what’s in store for him. All this is surely intended. At first he’d wanted to drink only Coca-Cola out of sentiment for what used to be, but has been persuaded, though by swift gesture only, that they may not be as they were—so is now drinking scotch. Some of them may be. Wherever possible they convict themselves of nothing. Does the jube, the water ditch, still run through Teheran, even on the main drag, Pahlevi? He hasn’t been able to get anyone to say. Perhaps they no longer want to say the former Shah’s name. Madame, as he was surely told long ago, is family-connected. Or perhaps because they have moved on.

  He knows now why they’re in Queens. The place belongs ostensibly to Fereydoun, who was once years ago at the UN. Each time apartments adjacent or on floors above or below have been vacated, he’s acquired them; he now has two floors, and after brief difficulty with the fire laws—a sweep of Madame’s pearled hand—has built a staircase to suit. Though he is single—had her eyelids leveled for a moment?—he was brought up in a palace, used to space. He’s of an in-between generation; though younger than Bakh, his father was a general with Reza Shah. The former Shah’s father can be mentioned by name; he is history. Fereydoun is her cousin, all here being at the very least cousins, of near or far degree. He’s actually the son of her mother’s oldest half-brother, and as a young man wheeled Madame in her carriage. “Because of our mothers being so young, much is different with us,” she says, again with a leveling. Wert can’t detect whether or not she ever looks up at the screen; he’s still waiting for her to mention Bakh. But a queen bee, if ever he’s seen one.

  What’s exhausting him is his effort to see these people more than visually. Some diplomats never get past seeing foreigners as scenery; it’s a hazard of the trade. He’s never had that trouble, even with the Japanese, once even achieving intimacy with one, though in France. Oh he knows the odds of all of it, the self-delusionary traps. Yet these people keep peacocking themselves in his mind, as if it’s in their very character. They have shallownesses he can’t plumb.

  Madame, fat as predicted but solidly so, as if every ounce counts for something, is hugely perfumed with a velvety scent meant perhaps to hide her competence. She’s one of those short women whose groomings take their attraction from the concentrated area over which these must be displayed. The face is small-nosed but powerful; the thick black hair, cut and winged in points on the cheeks, has been ruddied with henna in the way of older women; he had been given to understand that this was the matronly thing to do. Madame’s voice is ambery in French; her English grates as if she’s swallowed a string of bronze beads; both accents are serenely heavy. If she squirrels meaning in her cheeks, one can always lean forward; he recognizes the habit queens learn from their husbands, or from a court. She hadn’t learned it from Bakh.

  Fateh, the second wife, hovering always near, is a thin fashion-plate, expertly auburned all over. An extremely routine sophistication, twirling from rings to dark glasses, to scarves to hair, makes her look older than she must be, no doubt intended, as the mother of all those girls. The rings, seven of them, are more astounding than anyone else’s, but what’s most extraordinary about her—realized when she came forward to meet him, bowed with her hands clasped over her face, and greeted him in Farsi—was that they had already met. It can’t be, but of course is. After Jenny’s accident. This is the same woman who, veiled like one of the Fates, had dropped her veil at Bakh’s command. “With her place showing,” she’d said of Jenny’s fall. And now here she is, with her long silky legs showing, a little skinny and ankle-y, as if not yet used to it. Dressed in that color he’s heard the chic Departmental women bill to each other like birds, beige beige beige, she looks like many women he’s seen liberated from purdah or chador or even the nun’s habit—absolutely correct at all times, for anything but home. Two of the girls she’s had from the old man are in the background, mutedly the gigglers he’d heard over the phone, though not the Swiss school-girls he’d expected but highly painted young dazzlers.

  A few of the older men remind him of those he met at the Danieli; one or two may even be the same. Young or old, the men have lost a certain naïveté; not even the patriarchs would now expect the Department to compensate him for the death of one wife by supplying him another. The world has grown smaller for them, too—and along with their loss had itself lost something. What aggregate innocences he’s seen lost in his time—tribal to national, East to West, and now, ever heavier, his own West to East. The noble savage doth not long maintain—his father used to say, of the blacks who went north.

  At closer range, the men here haven’t changed in their surety—which comes out in dash in the younger ones, and in the elders in a mutual tribal satisfaction. Sexual authority, Bakh said once, feeds business too. “Our women make us all feel first-born. So a man can stay poor, with dignity.” The women have had to make the most changes, or the most open ones—and suffer the most confusion? In the main it was the men who forced them to change. They seem to be bearing up. They speak better English than the men. If anything, they want to be Western. The men merely want the West.

  “You still have your house?” Fateh giggles suddenly. For the past hour she’d been interviewing him, extracting just where he works, where he lives and especially whether he can expect to be posted again to Washington—all this with a spoiled-child’s forward air which the other women falsely deplore. “Fateh!” they cluck, and smile. She reminds him of some Southern girls, half honey-giggle, half silly-sass, with an idiot gift for the socially useful impudence. But is this Fateh’s character? Or her duty?

  “House?” He’d already described his London one as rented only.

  “A—” Fateh turns to Madame. “A-thens?”

  At first he doesn’t get it; she’d pronounced the t. Then he understands more than necessary. She’s asking Madame’s questions for her. She’s the second wife.

  “Athens, Georgia. I’m afraid it isn’t my house.”

  “Not?” Fateh makes a
pursy sound, chiding him. For not having it. Or not crediting him.

  “My cousin’s house.”

  “Ah—your cousin’s.” A quick glance at Madame and a rippling phrase. So Fateh, too, speaks French as well as she does English—and doesn’t giggle in it. O la la, she’d said—we know about cousins.

  So Madame owns Fereydoun’s apartments here? He’s not surprised. And on Bakh’s money? A hunk of which she keeps in that pouch-bag of hers, ever-shifting on her lap? He glances up. All this may be Bakh’s—and the day not ended yet. “We’re always passing off our family junk on my cousin.” He sees that they truly don’t catch this. “I mean—the family’s always asking her to store things. Because the house is so big. It was our great-grandfather’s house. And some of us did go to be born in it.”

  They seem to understand this perfectly. As to a palace? He’ll never be able to explain the difference.

  “The beautiful ring is your cousin’s—Fereydoun showed me,” Madame says idly. Her first question.

  “No—it was my wife’s.” No one’s yet mentioned her. “My great-grandmother’s, originally.”

  “Very pure stone. Rubies of that class are now more valuable than diamonds. In Switzerland, we know stones.” She speaks to her pearl, her only ring, with a covert glance at Fateh’s array. “Your cousin has daughters?”

  “She’s unmarried.”

  They cast up their eyes.

  “Older than you?”

  “Eighty.”

  “Ah. A pity she’s not with you.”

  “She would certainly enjoy it.”

  “Fereydoun say—your cousin very angry.” Fateh rolls her eyes at him. “Because the ring—you want to bury it. With your wife.”

  When he doesn’t answer, Madame intervenes. “Fateh! And why not, Fateh? She was the first wife.”

  Fateh rises. If this is dismissal, she has no rancor.

  A sense of the harem is wafted to him. Alliances between the women, in spite of themselves. Or because. With the big-screen husband, up there like Bakh, a still photograph always watching from the background of their collective submission. But he’s heard they have their own insistences, powerful ones. “Madame…Manoucher’s wife, Soraya. Where is she?”

  Madame gets up. Inhaling, she addresses her body to rise, a royal chore. “My son’s wife has her own appartement. Fereydoun!” He appears. “He will take you there.”

  On the way out, men waylay him, the younger deferring to the old. He’s passed from one to the other, with cigars. Some are buying buildings here; others already have. He hears that shipping is for the Greek magnates; they do not poach. And thinks he hears, innuendo in Farsi, that they don’t approve of these shippers’ women. One of the younger men owns a bank. He’s learned that a relative of Wert’s is a banker in Baton Rouge. “A kissing cousin, actually.” They have the same concept, the man says. A black sheep, sort of, Wert says. “Now pretty old. He keeps dogs. Whippets. Races them. Wants to leave me them. I’ve refused. Not my sport. And rather expensive.” They look embarrassed, as the moneyed do at the mention of penury. Perhaps they worry he’ll become a liability—not that they’d ignore that. His presence here’s a guarantee of their solicitude for life—and of his. He sighs, answering absently from a kind of minor truth when asked what his sport is. “Horses.” He’s sometimes imagined that his pension will run to keeping a filly, on shares maybe, and boarding her out. But he sees that once again he’s reassured them.

  He and Fereydoun go up a staircase, Fereydoun plodding. Madame won’t have an elevator. Because of the “Machine”? Soraya’s household name. “You’ll see why.” They all have these nicknames, the women. Madame is Four Eyes.

  “What’s Fateh’s?”

  “‘Mouth.’”

  Wert’s guffaw echoes. Not a gentleman’s. This place coarsens him. Well, it’s needed. “Fereydoun…before we go in…what about Manoucher?”

  The old man stops on the stair. “He stays with Bakh. Until.”

  Possibly a year, the boy’d said. But when we spoke, the regime was still hanging on. “Won’t he be in danger now? Now that—”

  Fereydoun waits. He’s good at it.

  “Now that—the Shah.” Wert won’t go further. How do these people say it among themselves? In time of revolution these people are the ones seldom asked. The New York papers hadn’t, much. A revolution belongs to the poor.

  The old man exhales, putting a finger across his lips—a signal Wert’s been flipped in hotel rooms and embassies, seldom sure whether it comes from habit or romance. A world signal: the walls have ears. “You are with your government, Mr. Wert? Even in this house.”

  “Absolutely.” The truth. But also the right answer.

  “Manoucher—was already not with the UN.”

  “Oh? Since when.”

  “Since he marry Soraya.”

  “But Bakh—”

  “Made the marriage, yes. From prison.”

  “Bakh?”

  “Not him. The girl’s grandfather was his friend. She is in prison a year.”

  “Did—Manoucher know that? Beforehand?”

  “He is the son.” Fereydoun is a study, quizzical, sorrowful. “He is told. Later, he knows it for himself. Eh, eh.”

  “A university student, she was, he told me.” One of those.

  “Eh…But Manoucher is also the son of Madame.” Fereydoun, fisting up, pulls on imaginary reins. “All his life, the mother and the father. A power—what you call it?”

  “Struggle.”

  “Five years ago Bakh wants him out of the country—safe. He sees ahead. But she’s a Pahlevi. So the bargain is—Manoucher can go, if he goes to them, at the UN. But he must not see his father…So Bakh still gets his son out of the country. Eh?” Fereydoun twitters, looks pained, and stops himself, literally, by placing a hand on his Adam’s apple, or against the lap of flesh that now covers it.

  “At a sacrifice.”

  “Eh.” The deepest yet. Perhaps the hand helps.

  But as long as Manoucher stays—no grandson. “Will the wife go back now?” Now that the Shah…

  “She cannot. How she is—you will see. For other women, enough revolution if they are—” He lapsed into Farsi.

  “Out of the chador,” Wert said, forgetting to pretend he knew none.

  “Eh. Like Fateh—just give them a suit from Dior. Not Manoucher’s Soraya. They would put her in prison again. This time—the mullahs.”

  “Was Bakh with the mullahs? All along?”

  “Bakh?” Fereydoun spread his expressive hands. “They gossip suddenly that in Bakh’s mother’s family was the muj’tabad of Imam Reza in Meshed—you know what that is?”

  “The Blue Mosque. Head priest.”

  “I never hear that rumor before.” Fereydoun squints. “But in the case of wives, yes, Hossein is very religious there.” That nervous laugh again. “So…now he marries again. It’s late. The fox is at the throat. But an imam will be there. For all to see. And Manoucher, five years in America, is allowed to come home.”

  After a minute Fereydoun says, “Mr. Wert—you are not laughing? Eh no. What Bakh said is true then.” He waits until Wert straightens his face. “You are the son from the West.”

  Ho, now. Ho, there. I had a father. Still, the breath holds for a healing moment.

  Ferey’s curiously modeled face—is he merely an old gay?—appears over his shoulder. “And still so young, so blond, so handsome,” Fereydoun is cackling. “We are so surp—pleased. Still such a chance for happiness.”

  Bless them. For always saving you from themselves just in time. If you’re the son from the West, Bill Wert, then act it. “Mr.—” He's never actually heard the man’s last name. Fereydoun, he sees, isn’t going to supply it. “Fereydoun—what’s in store for me here?”

  The old man grips the balustrade, very handsome in his black-and-white way. There’s a decoration now in his buttonhole. His tongue moves under his lower lip, exploring it. “Eh, you don’t know?”

&nb
sp; “I know he must have his reasons for all this.” What I want to know is—how am I one of them?

  “Reasons? In the old days—there were reasons. Now it’s one foot after the other for people like us—and don’t look up at the third one, over your neck.”

  “I’m returning the pishkesh, by the way.” Perhaps he’s got the word wrong? “The gift pot they sent to me in London. Came from the museum in Teheran, I think, originally. It’s in that box there. I’ve filled it with British biscuits, for Madame.”

  “Biscuits. You brought biscuits. Dear Mr. Beel, she is insane about them. Bloomingdale’s has never enough. You must tell her at once.”

  “After you tell me.”

  But the old man’s coy. It’s none of his doing. He belongs to Madame. The pot—that amuses him.

  “Manoucher arranged for it, no doubt.”

  “He does what his Soraya tells him, these days.” A sly look. He glances at the door at the top of the stairs. “Of course, Bakh is a god to her—before. Like to everyone else. Eh? Even to me.” A glance at his remarkable gold watch. He smooths it, turning his wrist for the caress. Downstairs Wert had noticed some of them still swinging the old-style worry-beads. “So tell me your instinct. I maybe have mine.”

  “Okay. I’m to be—the American connection—right?”

  “Eh. Ah.” He is overwhelmed. “That is smart. Yes. Like with the pot. Right.” Thumbing his lip he looks long at Wert, eyes wide. “Ri-ight.”

  Wert’s not sure of it. But he’s tired of these colloquies in front of closed doors, instead of behind them. He knocks.

  No immediate answer.

  “Soraya has a guest,” Fereydoun says over Wert’s shoulder. “This week, from Teheran. Her aunt. And she will not keep a servant. Or not Madame’s.”