Abandon (34 page)

“It’s lovely in this weather,” she said. “You remember before. . . .”

When the twisting road ran out, it came to the “Road of the Heavens” that runs along the back of the hills like a line on a palm. He was tempted to remind her of the time she’d picked up his hand and seen whole heavens in it, found stars and crosses of fate, and said, “Your lines are so clear! Mine are a mess.” But any reference to the past is tricky when you don’t know where you’re going, so he simply said, “What’s your pleasure?”

They could drive up towards the mountaintop, where the air was high and chilly: his choice always. Or back towards the things they knew. Two people look at a stretch of road—he thought of McCarthy’s example in his lecture—and one sees an opening, the other the terror of the unknown.

“Let’s go down today,” she said, and he thought how perhaps she preferred to be left in her unhappiness because it was what she knew: she knew the rules and how to make her peace with them. The first time they’d come up here, there hadn’t been choices or metaphors: they’d only been nosing through the mist, trying to while away an afternoon.

As he drove back towards the city, they passed the illuminated phone booth, drab now in the sunlight, the shuttered country store (“FOR SALE” chalked up on its window), the broken piano he’d played in the cold night.

“Do you mind if we get out for a moment?”

“Of course not. Let’s stop.”

He paused by the road, and she got out and ran up the hill, as if to be away from him, or the car. The meadows were a field of color, up the slope, passing over the top of the hill and all the way down to the lake beyond, the inner valley. When he caught up with her, she was standing in a sea of orange, triumphant.

He caught his breath, and she sat against a tree; in every direction, the space went on and on.

“What would feel nice?”

“A story.”

“What kind of story?”

“A story like the one you told me before when we were up near here.”

“There was once a man,” he said, making sure to think about nothing and just let the words come through him, out, “who was a careful and respected religious teacher. He had two children, a wife, a group of students; he was famous for his skills as an interpreter of the law.”

She sat with eyes closed, the sun sweet on her pale face.

“Then, one day, out of the blue, another man appeared. He was a wandering dervish from far away, and as soon as the two of them met, they knew: each was the hidden key to the other. They talked and talked—everything rushed out of them, as if it had been waiting for this moment; not exactly as lovers of one another, but more, and better, as two lovers of the same sight. The same books, the same thoughts, the same beliefs. Their talk made them feel as if they were climbing through mountains, through the mist, into fields full of flowers, and high sunlight. They looked around at the place where they had arrived and recognized it as the place they’d been coming towards, half thinking of, all their lives.

“But the ones who were left behind when the teacher disappeared into the mist, the ones who had enjoyed his company and were suddenly deprived of it, were less happy now. Who is this new stranger who’s taken our loved one away? they said. Why should we wait, after all this time, while he gets to have him to himself ? They plotted and plotted, and, one morning, when the teacher woke up, he found his new friend gone.

“For days he was bereft. He searched and searched, he asked in the marketplace, in the mosque: everywhere. But the friend was nowhere to be found. Then, at last, when he had quite given up hope, he had a dream that the man was in the oldest city in the world, a place called Damascus. He sent his loyal younger son to find him, and there the man was, in a tavern, exactly as in the dream. He returned with the younger son, and the two old friends fell at one another’s feet, weeping.”

There was a light wind in the mountains today, but otherwise everything was silent. They were the only travelers on the mountain road on this weekday afternoon, and, eyes closed, she was surrendered to the story, the wind blowing all around.

“Again the friends lost themselves in talk, more fervent and grateful than ever now, having come so close to losing everything. The religious teacher found a woman in his household for the traveler to marry, to ensure he’d never have occasion to leave. The two of them lived in the same house, and, especially at night, when everyone else was asleep, they talked of whatever was secret in them, which was not a dark thing but a golden one.

“But the students, of course, grew more restless than ever, cut off from the one they loved. And one day, when the teacher stepped out, it was to find his friend—his image of the Beloved—dead on the doorstep. The rumors said that the teacher’s own second son had organized the murder.”

“And so the man was left bereft?”

“He was left, after the grief had worn out and grown tired, ecstatic. He was left full up with all the things he wanted to say to the absent friend, all the pent-up feelings for which he had not found a voice before. For whatever they shared could not be lost; indeed, his friend was more present to him now, more durably so, than ever before.

“Poems came out of him, and songs: great poems of triumph and surrender. He could never be cut off from his friend now, and, more important, never be pushed out of all they had worshipped together. They were linked irreparably. So much so that he found a new companion—an old unlettered goldsmith in the marketplace, a friend for decades. He took a new wife, cultivated new students and protégés. He lived in the knowledge that no one could take away from him what he had known and shared.”

There were tears in her eyes when he came to the ending, and he didn’t know how much he’d touched her, how much offended. “After all this time, you choose to tell me the true story.”

“You knew it all along, though. Even when I told the other one.”

“Of course I did. I’ve heard about Rumi and Shams; I was at that lecture the first afternoon, remember?”

“Then you knew I was making something up before? The first time we came up here.”

“That’s why I loved you. Because you were kind enough to give it a different kind of ending. To protect me. Why did you have to tell me the true story now?”

There are many ways to be cruel, he remembered Martine’s saying, and he wondered if that was what coming to the top of the mountain meant, too. To tell her the truth—that they were drifting apart—was an unkindness; but to tell her a lie—that everything would be all right—was an even deeper act of cruelty.

Soon after it was light, the next day, she slipped out—“shopping,” she said vaguely, but it was clear she just needed to be away, if not from him then at least from her sense that everything was unraveling between them. He went to his desk and worked a little on his revisions, to incorporate the new material that had been unearthed by an Iranian at USC, and yet all he could see was the phone at the edge of the desk: the magic object in the children’s story that, if you touch it, leaves you scalded. He’d tried and tried for months not to think of the business card from Damascus, lying among his papers; to call the number on it seemed a betrayal. Yet not to call the number now seemed worse.

“Hello. Kristina Jensen,” said the voice at the other end, as brisk and efficient as if it were in the office.

“Yes,” he said. “This is John Macmillan.”

“Camilla’s friend,” she said, and let the ambiguity hang in the air.

“That’s right. And the reason I’m calling, actually”—he tried to make it sound slow and natural, though he’d practiced it time and time again—“is that I’m going to be in Damascus soon, and I wondered if you needed anything taken to your friend.”

“Damascus?”

It was a paltry fiction, but she seemed in no mood to call him on it.

“For my research. And I think I’ll be seeing Khalil.”

“Oh,” she said, as if she was somehow relieved. “You haven’t heard.”

“Heard?”

“He got taken in. For questioning. I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Professor Khalil for several months.”

“I see.” And then, as if he knew what she was talking about, “His activities?”

“The usual,” she said, either because she took him at his valuation, or because she pretended to.

“Well, if you hear anything . . .”

“I’ll tell you. I’m sure Camilla will know where to find you.”

“If she knows where to find herself.” She laughed, as she’d done the time they’d talked before Christmas, and he felt a twinge of guilt.

“She’s never been the easiest sister to keep track of.”

“But she does have a job, doesn’t she? A steady source of income?” If he didn’t ask now, the chance might never come again.

“Oh, she’s well taken care of as long as my father is around.”

“And she does act now and then?”

“In her mind, perhaps.” The voice that had been keeping Camilla company all her life.

“And the degree at Oxford must have helped?”

“Oxford,” she said, and there was quiet for a moment. She spoke about her sister as if she were a banker, talking about a troublesome account, in debt; and as she paused at the other end, he thought he saw someone in a marketplace, wondering exactly how many beans to place in the scales. “We think, sometimes, that Oxford’s where the problems started. She went off on this course that took her away from us, from everything. After she came back, she was never really in sync again.”

“But she had her degree, new qualifications?”

“Oxford was her great escape,” the cool voice asserted at the other end. “ ‘Women adventurers in the Middle East.’ ”

The voice, again, that had been putting Camilla in place since girlhood; he felt, suddenly, as if he were on the wrong side of the table, with the police, informing on Khalil.

“But it doesn’t pay the bills,” he said, to bring them back to the safer ground of cliché.

“It doesn’t,” she said carefully, and then, noticing perhaps that he’d been doing all the questioning, “What about you? Someone told me you were looking for Sufi manuscripts.”

“Was looking.”

“You didn’t find any?”

“If you’re in a desert, the most dangerous thing you can see is an oasis.”

“You sound like Sefadhi,” she said, with a small laugh, and he, surprised she’d left an opening, pounced.

“You’re a friend of his?”

“Not really. Anyway, I’ll give you a call if I hear anything from Damascus.”

“Thank you. My regards to your father.” Since, every time she spoke about him, he was always “my” father, and never “ours.”

He really had put all thoughts of manuscripts aside; the visitation from the passionate Iranians had worked on him like a slap in the face. He looked in on her where she slept as he went to his study one morning (she’d returned the previous night), and wondered how he could ever make a connecting corridor between the two rooms. The poems seemed to have no meaning unless they could speak to someone like them, in a different century and culture; and yet they, he and she, had no value unless they led to something beyond themselves, more durable. Mortal and immortal lover weren’t just different as
“amor”
and “love” were different—separate words for the same thing. They belonged to different worlds.

And yet (this, too, had been the point, surely, that the lecturer had been making) one can be an image of the other. As a man, seeing a picture of Isfahan, is taking the first step, in his mind, towards understanding what the place means, and seeing it more deeply. Even if the man is a woman, in Los Angeles, sitting in a cluttered room with the curtains drawn.

He sat down at his desk and, less than ever like himself, drew out a fresh piece of paper and wrote, almost triumphantly (defiantly), “EPILOGUE: THE HIDDEN JIHAD.” The words that came out were mad, excessive—not unlike the young Sefadhi in his pamphlet, the part of him that was sane might have said; but the part of him that wasn’t sane pressed on, about how every battle in the world (between left and right, between Old World and New) is just the same battle, between the part of us that thinks the world is capable of redemption, and the part that sees it as fallen. “One reason we turn to the Sufis today,” he wrote, “is that they give us a sense of angels in a culture in which we’ve consigned most celestial beings to the New Age shop (and the darker ones to the Cineplex). They tell us that we are subject to something outside ourselves, though able to remake ourselves at any moment (the angel is within); there are, of course, more angels in the Quran than in any holy book.

“This hopefulness does not seem fashionable in the modern world. Take Goethe, for example, the very Goethe who loved the Persians so deeply that he learned their language in order to read the poems in the original. Before he got to that stage, though, the same Goethe, author of
Selige Sehnsucht,
or ‘Blessed Longing,’ gave us Mephistopheles, a devil who can play on a man committed to freedom and movement. The Sufis, by comparison, give us a counter-Mephistopheles, an image of a stranger who, instead, calls us back to our rightful, better nature. And in a culture in which we have no gods but plenty of beliefs—or, as commonly, no beliefs but plenty of gods—and where happy endings disappeared with faith itself, what we need more than anything is . . .”

He heard something stirring at the far end of the room, and looked up.