Authors: Pico Iyer
II
The famous manuscripts that so many of us are chasing now came out of Iran in two large waves,” the German was saying, as he walked into the hotel banqueting hall a little late. “The first, as you know, was the wave sent out by the exiles, when they saw the Revolution coming close, the same exiles who sent their carpets, their jewels, even their children out into the world. The second group, more interesting for our purposes, are the ones that were smuggled out by the regime, after the Revolution had come to power.” The large German started to cough, and the audience—the place was packed— leaned a little closer. Clearly, he was enjoying being the center of attention. “The old houses, the university, even the museums of Tehran, of Shiraz, were raided, and their treasures sent out in order to gain hard currency.”
There was more along these lines—the Shah’s sister herself was believed to have taken riches beyond counting to her house above the sea in Santa Barbara—and then, with a flourish, the scholar from Hamburg (a thick red beard, and a dark-blue corduroy jacket) said, “The problems of Iran are now the problems of everyone. Globalism has made of Tehran an international syndicate.”
A few people asked questions—“Are you not projecting your own interests onto the regime?” from someone near the front, “What does it say about the Orientalizing impulse?”—and then, as if the room itself were exhaling its breath, everyone scattered, into their private groups, to discuss who was studying with whom, and what the Islamic Reformation, if it ever came, would do to their lives.
He’d felt, stepping off the plane, and back into the life that had been his a few months before, as if he were stepping into a play for which he’d forgotten all the lines; everyone else was in costume, as they were supposed to be, and only he was walking among them in civilian clothes, an outsider who might be taken for an intruder. Even the paper he’d been preparing for so long, on Rumi and John of the Cross (“Abandon: East and West”), seemed to have changed color or shape on him somehow, till the words themselves appeared to be turning on their heads. He’d been pleased, months before, to think of “being abandoned” as the perfect description of the mystic’s state of transport and self-forgetfulness; but now, suddenly, “being abandoned” seemed to mean something quite different, closer to being deserted. He thought, without wanting to, of a young woman in her sister’s house alone.
Seeing that he wasn’t quite the person he was supposed to be, he went up to his room and drew back the curtains. Outside, beside the nearby minaret, a perfect crescent moon: the classic Islamic symbol, which reminds us that there is always more going on than we can see. Even when the moon is full. Then, going out into the street, as if to orient himself—a part of him was floating, high over the ground—he walked away from the main square, the noisy laughter from the bars, the sound of clicking heels for tourists and violently strummed guitars. Seville seemed almost an exercise in teaching one how to read: for those with eyes, there were Arab spirits hiding out even in the menus posted outside restaurants
(“arroz,” “naranja,” “azúcar”),
even in the faint memory of the ghazal that haunted the guitars.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, he came to a residential quarter, much quieter, where he could catch, just occasionally, the sound of laughter from an upstairs window, a slip of light escaping from behind a heavy door, and, peering in, he saw a courtyard—a tiled fountain and a fruit tree—that seemed to tell anyone who looked that the treasure of an Andalusian house exists in all that can’t be seen from the street. Going into a bar—on impulse—he did what he hadn’t expected to do, and picked up a postcard from the cash register. Doves, and a pond shaped like a star.
Then, scribbling very quickly on the back, without putting a name at the top, he wrote:
Not by constraint or severity should you have
access to true worth, but by abandonment.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
When he came back to the hotel, the official life of the conference was over for the day; and so the real life was just beginning. He wasn’t ready to sleep yet—his day inverted by the change in clocks, and something else in him pulling him along, the way an overeager dog might pull his owner—and he looked in on the bar on the second floor. There were one or two people he knew, or thought he knew, from conferences past, but no one he thought he could talk to now. Downstairs, in the basement, there was another pub, and when he looked in, he saw Hans Müller, the speaker of this evening, sitting at a small round table with someone he thought had been with him at SOAS, and a small dark man with a beard, whose shoulder bag made him think of an Islamic adventurer. In between them, a woman— Anne, he seemed to remember, from NYU—and the loud sound of laughter.
They made room for him when he came up, and soon the conversation was back to how America was in search of new enemies now that the Cold War was over, and how
Jihad vs.
McWorld
was arguing that Islam would be the great enemy of the new postmodern order. Ever since the Revolution in Iran, their field had stakes, a new urgency; they were now, willy-nilly, people of the world.
“Sefadhi, too, right?” said the woman, though he couldn’t tell how much weight lay behind the question. “Don’t they say he’s an agent for the government in Tehran?”
“They say everything about Sefadhi,” he said, a loyal student, and a polished one.
“But you were in Damascus, I thought I heard,” she persevered. “You must have seen Khalil?”
“Insofar as anyone can see him.”
“What’s he like?” Like many of the stars of the field, the Syrian scholar had the glamour of the seldom seen; he so seldom left his little cell that all kinds of rumors and mysteries gathered around him.
“Hard to say. I think he’s learned to keep himself hidden from view.”
“But he’s an old friend of Sefadhi’s, right? From before the Revolution?”
“That’s what they say.”
“And Azadeh, too,” piped up the small man with the beard, suddenly engaged. “Ferdows Azadeh.”
“Twenty years ago, perhaps,” said Müller, not anxious to be left out, and then the talk drifted off, to why Sefadhi had chosen to put himself in Santa Barbara, so far from the Washington that most of the émigré professors sought out. The talk rose and crested around him, and he thought of a small room across the world, the ocean outside the window, someone hopeful and hidden lying across his bed.
As the evening went on, more and more empty glasses accumulating on the table, he felt a pressure, unspoken, from his right, and when he looked up, the woman beside him looked at him directly, and pushed her glass a little closer to his. Academics were natural spies.
“What’s the real reason you’re here?”
“The same as always. I have a paper to give tomorrow.”
“I know that. But I’d heard something else.” He didn’t rise to that—Sefadhi would have been proud—and she went on, “Something about looking for manuscripts. Kristina Jensen and someone else.”
The attempt at sounding casual was so strained, he didn’t make much attempt to dodge it. “Everyone’s looking for manuscripts. Just ask Hans.”
The large German looked at them from across the table, attention caught by the sound of his name.
“I’d been meaning to ask you, actually,” said the Englishman, seeing he had a chance now, “where exactly did all these manuscripts end up?”
“Everywhere,” said Müller, more relaxed now that his paper was over, and it felt like they were only making conversation. “Paris. Vancouver. Los Angeles. Everywhere the people go.”
“Those are the ones that came out early?”
“Why not? The ones the government steals, they send to Syria. Saudi. Through pilgrims on the hadj.” He raised his mug and took a long swig. “The keepers of the Islamic Revolution selling its treasures for BMWs!”
Then, as if realizing, belatedly, he’d said too much, he stopped and looked across at him. “You are very interested in this topic. From where comes your interest?”
“I have a fiancée,” he said, without thinking, “in Los Angeles. From Iran. She talks about them in the context of her family.”
“ ‘Her family,’ ” said Müller, repeating the words as if to show how implausible they sounded. And then, eager to be rid of the questions, drew them back into the larger conversation.
He gave his talk the following morning—or someone who seemed to be standing in for him, a stunt double, delivered it—and then he went up to his room and fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke—10:07, it said on the little clock by the bed—he didn’t know for a moment where he was, whether it was day or night. Then, stepping across to the window, he drew the curtains back and saw the Christian image of faith—he hadn’t noticed it before—above the minaret. Beside it, as before, the Islamic moon.
He was feeling revived now, as if he’d slept through half a lifetime, and, needing some fresh air, he got dressed quickly and went down into the lobby to take a walk. As he stepped out, he felt a tentative hand on his back and whirled around to see who was beside him.
It was the small dark man from the night before.
The man nodded, as if it was natural that they meet again, and as he stepped out, the man stepped out beside him, as if, without words, they’d agreed to spend the evening together. As they walked down the street, neither of them sure what exactly to say, it felt, absurdly, like an assignation.
“You’re studying in Germany, I take it,” he said, in the voice that Martine always mocked. “Your English voice,” she called it.
“Now,” said the man. “I was in England before.”
“Really? Where?”
Around them, the cobblestones of the central quarter, the old lampposts and balconies made up to re-create the city of Don Juan (the city that Teresa of Avila had called the most evil place she knew). Every now and then a couple came out of a bar, all elegant dishevelment: a hand around a waist, the sound of drunken laughter.
“I was in London,” said the man, in his shy, strange way. “Then America.”
He found the place he’d read about—there didn’t seem to be a way to avoid a conversation—and they walked into a raucous pub, all student laughter, and, here and there in the corners, people they knew from the conference trying very hard not to be seen.
He got drinks for them both—the dark man wanted only a 7Up—and then they sat down and tried to find ways around the silence.
“You’re originally from Iran?” he tried, and the man nodded.
“They called me a barbarian in England,” he said. His conversation was strange; his accent was good, and he’d clearly spent most of his life in the West, and yet he skipped from topic to topic the way a bad needle would on an old LP. “They showed our class a map and said, ‘This is where civilization ends.’ ”
“It’s not a very hospitable culture.”
“I didn’t know where my parents were,” the man went on, swerving again, though this was more likely a story he’d told often. “They were in Germany, they were in Turkey. Sometimes, for years, I didn’t hear anything about them.”
“It’s sad,” he said, inadequately.
“They sent me to America, like all the other people without a home. When the rebels took the embassy, they brought me in for questioning. The FBI office in San Diego.” He had about him the quality that Persia had carried through all its empires, of melancholy, the sadness that accompanies a fall from glory. And mixed with that, a bitterness, that insufficient attention was being paid.
“You haven’t been back?”
The man shook his head no. “You hear them in Santa Monica. These voices from eastern Iran, from places I’ve never heard about. Talking about what they had for dinner, what is happening in their village, how they dream of America, the land of plenty.” The bitterness again. “On the radio, the satellite. But the people in America are singing Sufi songs, reciting poems, the same people who never went to the mosque at home.”
“The exiles, you mean?”
The man didn’t answer. It was just a form of nostalgia, his silence said, a way to try to keep the community going far from home.
Then, as if he’d come to some decision, the man leaned forwards, with more attention. “I am hoping,” he said, “that you can help me.” His voice went low, though nothing he was saying seemed to be very confidential. “We have a group—it is an association—that is working to collect the body, the documents of Islam.”
“To bring it into one place.”
“Exactly.” He rewarded him with a smile. “FAITH. The Friends and Associates of the Islamic Tradition and Heritage.
“And I am thinking that you can help us. You give us information, you give us advice. You tell us what you see when you make research trips.”
“I don’t think I’d have very much to say.” The very sound—his father’s voice—he’d gone to California to escape.
“Sometimes you are inside a circle when you think you are outside it,” the man said, warming to his theme. “You send us e-mails. You give us brochures. You help us to put together the broken body of our faith.”
“But I’m not necessarily the one who should be doing that.”
“Of course we have enemies,” the man said, though he’d said nothing about that. “ ‘Colonizers of the truth,’ they call us. ‘Intellectual mercenaries.’ They want us only to accept their reading of the tradition. But it is something important we are doing, I think you know.”