Authors: Pico Iyer
She said nothing, so he continued.
“She was bright, funny, full of life. Though she liked to hide it behind a tough exterior.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“And we got on well enough for a while.”
“And then?”
“Then, I don’t know. I think there was always something in me— a restlessness, a kind of distance, perhaps—that was unsettling to her. She used to say that I was faraway even when I was next to her. I’ll never forget this one time, in Turkey, soon after college, we were staying near the Hagia Sofia. And as soon as the day’s first call to prayer went up, I went out, to see what the mosque looked like at dawn. I wanted to see it at its purest. When I came back, it must have been seven-thirty, eight, I realized I’d done the wrong thing: gone out to see the mosque when I should have been with her.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Not then. We went on with our tour, had our breakfast. But a few weeks later, after we got back to England, there was this call, in the middle of the night, and it must have been a boy in his teens, very shy, polite even, but persistent. ‘Mister Macmillan, I’m calling to say I saw your friend Marty last week. We had quite a big time together. She told me she was going to call you herself, but I didn’t think she would, so that’s why I’m calling. To tell you we had a big time together.’ He didn’t need to say any more, though he did, being young, and somehow I felt that he was being completely straight with me, was an innocent in his way. And Turkey had been the cause of it.”
“So you let her go?”
“The opposite. I held her closer than I’d ever done before. We went, the next time we had some time free, to Cephalonia, this amazing island from Homer where you can feel the gods and ghosts of Odysseus’s time all around you. A dazzling blue sea and white buildings everywhere so you just disappear, fade into the brilliant light, and olive trees and shepherds that might as well have been there four thousand years ago. It was beautiful. But it was already too late, we both of us knew. Something had been broken, and there was no putting it back together again.
“The last day, in Athens—we were back in the Plaka, in a small hotel—she said, ‘I’ll never be complicated enough for you. I couldn’t be. I’ll never give you something to get your teeth into.’ And that was more or less the end.”
“You drifted apart?”
“Not in so many words, but yes.”
“And Rumi became your consolation.”
“Not exactly. But he was reliable. And reliably uplifting. That was another thing Martine could never get over. ‘How can I ever compete with some legendary old man who’s been dead for donkeys’ years? I’ll never be as mysterious as he is. I can’t be. He’s got seven hundred years on me.’ If there were anything she could do, she said, she’d do it. But there wasn’t.”
“So how can I compete?”
“By giving me something he couldn’t. By being yourself.”
He’d done it again. Like when he’d leaned in to kiss her goodbye on the beach, or reached for the Song of Songs when he’d only been trying to pass the time. Somehow with her he seemed to have a genius for saying more than he intended and coming out with lines he’d have laughed at in the Cineplex.
She turned her head a little and kissed him now, deeply, imploringly, as if to try to summon up someone deep in hiding. Her hair fell around their cheeks, their mouths, and they were tented in its golden fall.
Then, remembering how quickly she took flight, he pulled back a little. “Maybe we should wait.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if the fault was hers. “It’s been a long time since I was intimate with anyone.”
The words she used, like the Alice band with which she kept her hair in place, her high-buttoned dress, its whites and pastels—all of it issued a warning more forcibly than anything she said. As if she were a vase only inches behind a velvet curtain. Move one inch too far, and she’d be broken.
And yet her face, when she forgot about herself, was filled with an ancient light and clarity. He thought of the time, as a boy, when his mother had dragged him around the Uffizi in Florence, and he, a typical schoolboy of nine or ten, had yawned conspicuously with each new room, and looked in the other direction. Then they’d come into room 10, the madonnas of Botticelli, and something had caught at him. It wasn’t the cackling cherub at the center of each painting; that seemed almost a joke. And yet the girl who cradled him in every picture was almost painfully alive. Half glowing with a mother’s pride, half holding back, as if startled by the light with which she’d been entrusted. Half moving towards the Angel Gabriel, to hear what he was whispering; and yet half withdrawing, as if not sure if she wanted this new destiny.
He hadn’t known at the time that Botticelli is the obligatory favorite of every romantic schoolboy; hadn’t even heard that Simonetta Vespucci’s uncle was the one to find America. He’d known nothing about the Angel Gabriel’s connection with Mohammed. Yet what he’d seen had been more real than any of that: a girl awakened to a light she hadn’t known about, and fearful, disconcerted, now, lest her life would never be the same.
“What are you most afraid of in the world?” she said, and the spell, for the moment, was broken.
“Of losing myself. You?”
“Of losing everything. Being alone.”
“Being abandoned, in a way.”
“I guess,” she said, and then turned away, as if the interlude was over. “Anyway, that’s safer than any of the other answers.”
In the morning, when he forced himself to the library, she was sleeping. Stretched out, even when he returned in late afternoon, in a happy state of trust. She never slept easily at home, she’d said the night before, the conversation drifting on till dawn, and the two of them, without seeming to intend it, moving from the sofa to the bed. Yet sometimes all she wanted to do was sleep and sleep so she’d never have to look at the life that was waiting for her.
When she heard him come in, she stirred, and opened her eyes.
“You deserted me.”
“For a few hours.”
“To do what?”
“To surrender.” He hadn’t expected that.
“To what?” she said, and she pushed the sheets back just a little.
“The usual. My poems.”
“Words on the page.”
“Why not?”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the love,” she said, as if talking to herself, and then he noticed that her face was flushed, and her lips were faintly parted.
“For them,” he said. Whatever she needed—whatever he needed— he thought, came at some level deeper than the body.
She looked up at him, clearly piqued that the moment had been lost.
“You never talk about your parents.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“They’re in England?”
“They were. Not now.”
She looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You needn’t be. I never told you.”
“So that’s why . . .” and then she stopped herself.
“That’s why I’m the center of the Macmillan empire,” he said, to bring them up from the deep.
She didn’t laugh, though. She looked at him and looked at him, and then looked down, as if she was shaking.
“What is it?”
She shook her head, eyes full. “It’s too poignant.”
When he returned from the library next day, she was gone.
The darkness came on much earlier now, and soon the first winter storms were slashing through the town: two, three days of agitated skies, the sound of unrelenting rain, and then the streets outside were silent again, and pockets of blue could be seen in the white. Pieces of a broken pot, and the clouds just rimmed with light. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the storm moved on, and he awoke one morning to find the world as sharp as if it had just been slapped awake.
Early winter was the magic time in California, the days acquiring an edge, a form of sharpness, that they never had in the bleary summers. Voices soft and low in the sweatered dark, heat lamps on the terraces at six o’clock and around everything a kind of definition, a startled clarity, that gave the sunny days more meaning. In winter California became an older place, with secrets.
He called her occasionally to try to bring her back, but all he got was the sound of a phone ringing and ringing, now and then a male voice saying shortly, sharply, “This is 437-2962. Talk!” Then, a few days later, three hectic beeps that told him that the tape was now full: no messages could be taken in any case.
“We run from our fears,” he wrote, pushing himself back into the papers on his desk, “and so run from the very place where our transformation might be hiding. We wall ourselves in with what we think we know, and then what we don’t know, which is what can save us, is left knocking on the door.” Then, wondering what he was really writing about, he tried to open the books on the desk to bring himself back to the matter at hand: the fact that Rumi had signed half of his poems with the name “Shams”—the bedraggled stranger he had claimed as his own—and the fact, on top of that, that this was a metaphor as well as an ancient gesture: in Persian, “Shamsuddin” means “Religious Sun.”
“Five hundred of his poems, more,” he went on, “Rumi ended with the word for silence. As if to say that words or poems can only take you so far, and no farther. At some point you have to cast off from reason, say goodbye to the things you can explain and then . . .”
And as he began to finish the sentence, as seemed to happen every time he was back in his dissertation now, the phone on the desk began to ring.
He let it go unanswered, not eager to come back through the centuries to hear a telemarketer make his sales pitch (or, what seemed little different, to hear a well-meaning classmate talk about a manuscript that had shown up in Herat), and then, as the unknown caller continued to talk—no click—he turned the volume up to see why the intruder was going on so long.
On the machine, the voice he least expected to hear: “. . . the unwarranted intrusion,” Sefadhi was saying, “but if I don’t hear otherwise from you, I shall expect to see you at six p.m.”
He played the whole message back again, the volume higher, and heard what might have been a practical joker, or a trick concocted by some Department prankster: what sounded like his adviser summoning him for an “informal meeting” two days from now, on the beach. So informal that he was fixing a time and place. In all the time they’d worked together, Sefadhi had made it a point never to meet him outside the office; if anything, he’d tried to screen him off from any glimpse of a private life. When, once, one of his graduate students had summoned the courage to ask him about this, he’d just said, in his characteristic way, “Limits are what give meaning to affection.”
It sounded so much like a ruse that he wondered what could lie behind it. Was Sefadhi concerned that his most loyal student was running after manuscripts that didn’t exist, moving in the opposite direction from his thesis? Or did he have some message to impart, about where real manuscripts might be?
When he arrived at the Beachside Bar on the appointed day, a few minutes before six—Sefadhi was ruthless in such courtesies—the waiter led him out onto the terrace, and he saw his teacher sitting alone at a round table with a white tablecloth on it. As soon as he heard the approaching footsteps, the older man looked around and stood up to greet him, and his slightly informal wear—an open-necked white shirt and sweater—made him look as he seldom did: forlorn.
“What will it be, John?” he said, taking care not to sit down till his student had done so.
“Just a Coke,” he said, knowing that his adviser would never drink in public.
Around them it was already dark, and the waiters were stepping from table to table to turn on the heaters. The tables with their white linen, laid out in front of the sea—the islands outlined in the distance, and fading into the dark—looked like a party someone had arranged for friends who would never come. Sefadhi asked him in a desultory way about Seville, who had asked after him, who had not: all the questions he could have asked, and didn’t, at their debriefing session. Then, as if casually, he told him a little about what had happened to Uwe while he was away: the Department was still alive with the news of the Dutch student who, six months before the completion of his doctorate on Scientology, had suddenly taken flight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the word had it, his life had begun to turn into a television melodrama. His cat had been found dead on his driveway; his children had been handed notes at the day-care center; someone had even said that he’d gone and done the Witness Protection thing, taking a name from an old gravestone, and living now under another identity in a far-off town.
“They found out about his thesis, I gather.”
“Or somebody told them,” said Sefadhi, pointedly. “What about you? The manuscripts you were so excited about.”
“Not excited now. They don’t seem eager to be found.”
“No one’s been of any help?”
“The opposite. The people who know something seem the last ones to talk.”
“And the ones who know nothing talk and talk.”
He guessed, from his professor’s joke, that he’d given the right answer.
“And if I did find something . . .”
“It would be worse.”
“I know. It’s better that I don’t.”