Abandon (42 page)

He turned back, in spite of himself, thirsty, half possessed, to the poems running in perfect lines, innocuously, through the pages. Thirty percent or so, he realized as he translated, came from Sufi’s most famous master; the others were more like ghosts, or shadows, of Rumi’s impulse. And, more strangely still, they were like weak imitations of the “health club” Rumi of current legend: all his talk of transport, and none of the grief, the ache of an inner jihad. He put the book in the bottom drawer of the desk, and thought himself a “taken” man again.

At night they went through his head, the lines in the foreign script, the words he’d translated: “Let me in, you cry at the door,” “Love himself has made a space inside me that is light.” A secret turning, a drummer drumming, figures seen only in outline. This one he’d first met many years ago, in Istanbul, with Martine; this one was like the pale sister of the famous couplet. He slept restlessly, bobbing on the surface of himself, and sometimes, when he descended deeper, he felt as if he were running through alleyways, the lines coming after him like footfalls. When it was daylight, he went straight to the desk, as straight as he’d gone to her in lieu of the desk for all these months. If she’d meant to release him to the other room, she’d succeeded beyond expectation.

The crow caws and cackles.
This bird is silent.
Which of them has more to say?

You come but I am nowhere.
No when. No why. No you.
You leave, and you are everywhere.
No me.

He thought, for some reason, of the two bearded men who had visited so recently, the one so rapt, an arrow on fire, the other a boulder who never moved. These terms, even in translation, were the same as theirs, but then that was the point of Sufism: The spokesman is emptied of himself and all that comes out from him is universal. He speaks for everyone as the lover in his transport is every other lover.

And besides, much of this might be him. In bringing the words into English he felt at times as if he were carrying jewels, kept under a special light in a vault, out into a dirty kitchen, where they looked just like any other baubles. It became hard to tell what was him, and what was they.

You the sky, and I the astonished earth.
What makes you grow new again inside me?
How should the earth know what you have sown with her,
It is enough that you know: she is big with you.

Almost an insult again: another one of Rumi’s best-known poems. It was as if the book (he now thought of it as an unknown person) were playing games with him, deliberately taunting him with things he knew, so that the mix of false and true grew more confounding. As if someone were to include a soliloquy from
Hamlet
inside a newly published play, not as reference or allusion, but as if it were being written for the first time. Or else—and this would be most fitting—someone was trying to explode all thought of identity and authorship, as if to say (most Sufically of all), “Who cares who wrote this? It is itself, like any child.”

Cause, effect; before, after.
What need of terms?
The moon is bright outside the city walls.
Some men, far off, begin to turn.

To pull himself away from the labyrinth into which he was beginning to be drawn, he walked into the other room, and thought: this is California, at the end of the twentieth century. These are cryptic poems of the kind I might, in certain circumstances, mock. I am a graduate student on a fast-fading scholarship, with chapters to complete. What do these poems mean to me?

And then, back at his desk, he would be far away again, in Konya or Shiraz, and people were gathering under cover of dark outside the city walls. He was translating the loves, the longing, of someone he didn’t quite know, but recognized (maybe himself, maybe the one who kept him company at night); and yet, really, what was translated was himself. He fell into a deep and sudden dream and saw a figure all in black jumping out at him; he woke up, shaking, with an overwhelming sense of evil. She’d passed on even her dreams to him.

Before you, there were shadows, fears.
After you the same.
Why do I feel transformed?

What is that knocking?
Who goes there?
Not you, or he, but I.
I knock at my own door
And no one answers.

Some of the poems—many of them, really—were like children’s toys, flimsy, so fragile it felt as if they’d break off in his hand; others had a dissonance, as of some modern copies of an old chant. Others still might have been deliberate fakes, or reminders, in some way, of how he’d misread the poems before. The more obscure the verse, he remembered reading in a book, the more likely it was to be authentic: since which impostor wishes to create something that can’t be understood?

At times now he felt as if he were on the long early nights when the darkness had led them on and on, as if they were explorers: so intimate, she’d said, they’d hardly needed to touch. Skins, selves, everything had seemed to dissolve; as if they had crossed a threshold and now whatever passed between them was light. It was the other Californian tragedy, he’d thought at the time: once you see a spark in someone, or think you’ve found a Golden Age, you can’t settle to anything less. You become a wanderer for life.

Now he picked up the phone and wondered how he might approach her. He imagined Greg or Kristina or the male voice that said, “Talk!” The only thing he could say to any of them, “Please tell Camilla to call,” was what she knew already: the point of the whole exercise (except, of course, she’d given him the book as a present for an anniversary: maybe she’d never expected it to be a goodbye present, too).

The light began to fade and darken in the sky, and the wind came up outside. He saw the pieces of bush that would skip past on the pavement outside the abandoned house, heard the doors rattling in the place where they’d slept on the floor. It was as if he’d stepped out of himself, into some alternative life that had been waiting for him all along, just as the streets around him were back to their summer selves now, a ghost town.

He lit the candle on the desk, his nightly ritual now, and as he looked over the running, skipping lines, their dots, their strokes, his eyes began to blur and he saw waves of sand running across the desert, and meaning nothing. The beautiful lettering became pure ornament, as when a Sufi, singing a ghazal, takes leave of meaning and flies off into a cry. Hundreds, thousands of bodies lined up in a great space, heads bowed as one, feet turned to the heavens, so many of them there was no individual body, just a mass, a great network of connected lines. And then he bent down more closely and thought he saw a hesitation here, a small amendment there. Perhaps a change in mood, a latter-day revision?

When the knock came in mid-morning, he jumped up and ran to the door to open up, preparing his face to meet her, and found himself looking at the startled face of the mailman. “You know it’s a public hazard, not collecting your mail? People get the wrong kind of idea.”

“I know,” he said wearily, and signed for the special shipment, from Los Angeles: a photocopy—he knew before opening it—from Sefadhi, of the scholarship stipulation. The Iranian way was always to push mildly, insistently at the back window.

There was another letter, postmarked Bakersfield, and he recognized the writing almost without looking at it.

John,

Funny, isn’t it, how well we communicate on the page? But in person we’re always at one another’s throats—in every sense, I guess. It’s one of the things I miss. You told me you had to avert your eyes from my “official self ” to see the self you cared for; but then, I think, you began to avert your eyes from everything, or the “official self ” blotted everything else out, because you certainly weren’t seeing me any longer.

Which meant, as you know, that I couldn’t, either. You were the way I forgave myself. You were the way I told myself I could be better, or at least that I had better things inside of me. I didn’t ask for that, it just came with the territory. You became the place where I put my better self.

So now I’m gifted with this sense of who I am, or could be, but there’s no way I can get to it. You’ve shown me a better world and then walked off with the key. It’s all right for you, you have your books, your desk, all the places you can be when you’re alone. I have only you. That’s my equivalent. You are my books, my private space, my chance for something better. Not because I think you’re so great (God forbid!), but just because I find myself with you. What you found in New Mexico I find in your arms.

Plain and simple.

But not fair. Because you can go to New Mexico anytime you choose. But I can’t take myself to you. And if I do, it takes me weeks—months—to recover from the devastation. Or recover from the missing you. So I’m screwed either way, if I have a good time or a bad one.

Which leaves me alone, with my heart in another town, in the safekeeping of someone who’s off reading poems. It’s unfair and unequal. What did I do to deserve this? Fall in love with you?

You know I wish you well. But I feel like I’m alone here, in the dark. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. Until it stopped happening.

Miss me lots—

Love (even if you don’t want it),
Camilla

The next day, he took himself up into the hills. It wasn’t what he’d expected to do, and he still had to be careful to drive along streets he’d never driven along with her. But this predated all that: the first place he’d discovered in Santa Barbara, out on the southern edge of town, in the hills, near a grove of oak trees, the sky always unnaturally blue above the thin, deserted road.

Off to one side was a seminary, and on the other a sign in elaborate calligraphy announcing the “Church of I AM.” Farther up, the community of nuns, belonging to an Eastern order. The first time he had come up here, he’d been amused to find that all the choice real estate was in religious hands: as in some old story in which the king has everything but peace, and so stands ready to give all his wealth to any wise man who can put his heart at ease.

The congregation of sisters worshipped in a great temple set against the mountains, fragrant with sandalwood and incense, and all around it were flowerbeds and fruit trees. Down below, in the far distance, the misty outline of the coast, and the sea, usually deep blue, framed between the eucalyptus trees. On the steps of the temple, looking out at the great distances, he usually felt everything come into clarity.

He parked the car and walked up to the space beside the moss-green bell. She’d given him a present, which perhaps she’d planned to explain to him, but he’d sent her away, and so turned it into a mystery. It might have been a way to pull him back to her (in which case, somehow, it had done all she might have wished). It might have been her ultimate act of generosity—to hand him over to what had always seemed to tug him away from her. It might have just been an attempt to help him in his thesis: in the New World they still believed in giving people what they wanted.

He sat in the summer light, in the silent afternoon, and let the sun wash over him. One time, in Fez, he’d stolen out of the room while Martine was sleeping, and tried to go back to the Old City after dark. She’d admired a pair of amethyst earrings in the suq, and now he was determined to surprise her with them. But of course he’d got lost almost instantly—that’s one way locals stay ahead of visitors in Fez—and the more he’d tried to find his way out, or back, or anywhere, the more he’d felt like someone chasing his own past. Even in daylight it would have been hard to find; at nighttime it was impossible. Wild music came out of the stalls, and urchins pulled at him, offering him this place, that one; men in hoods appeared suddenly around corners, and then vanished again into the dark.

It was like, he realized now, being lost inside a piece of music, but one in which there was no melody or rhythm he could make out. And the more he tried to escape, the more he was lost at its heart. “I help you, sir?” “You buy from me?” “Your wife, sir? You want for your wife?” “My sister, sir. My uncle. My friend.”

“Quite a long excursion,” she’d said when at last he’d found his way back, attaching himself to a pair of Germans who’d had the sense to bring a guide with them. “Got in deeper than you thought?”

Against her ancestral manner he was always helpless. Even the earrings he’d picked up from the Germans’ expensive hotel looked hollow now.

“Very nice. Though you still haven’t told me what you were doing all this time.”

“Looking for these.”

“Of course. What else would you be up to?”

Another of the moments to match, like a pendant, the early morning in Istanbul.

When he went back to his desk now, he knew where he was going. “Camilla,” he said, after picking up the phone, dialing the number that led to her answering machine in Los Angeles. “I did open your present, and I’m astonished. I don’t know what to say. Honestly, I’m speechless in every way. Can you tell me anything about it?”

It was useless waiting for her call—she might not get the message for weeks, and even if she did, she might rejoice in his discomfort. The person who responded to him might be in hiding, or (this was Camilla) might have become someone quite different. Wanting to feel he was doing something, he drew out a long piece of clean paper, and wrote.

Nigel:

Can you help me with something? Something stupid. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I want to make contact with someone, in Spain, and, for reasons that are complicated but not entirely dishonest, I don’t want him to know I’m contacting him from California. I know it sounds utterly mad, but take it from me that it’s what this mad field entails.