Abandon (44 page)

“Hello, Mr. Hussein. It’s John Macmillan—yes, I’m sure you remember—and the reason I’m calling is that I have a manuscript of my own now, at least something in my hands, and I remembered you told me about an evaluator . . .”

It hardly mattered what he said, since Hussein couldn’t make out most of it in any case, and was now shouting back, “You are here in Jaipur? Now? Please, you must be my guest, I’ll tell . . .”

At last he got his message across, and Hussein said, “Of course, I’d be honored to be of assistance. I’ll ask Ahmed to fax you the details.”

Next morning, when he awoke, there was a name and number in Paris.

One of his students had told him, years before, about the courier system—fly across the Atlantic for next to nothing—and on the fourth day of his vigil, he got an assignment, and boarded the United flight for Paris, armed with nothing but his small black carry-on and the parcel given him by the company. He felt curiously like a spy— Sefadhi’s story now came back to him—and after he’d handed over his unknown booty to a man at the other end, he took a bus into the heart of the city. It was raining, as it always seemed to be here, and when he found the place he remembered from before, the man said, “I am so sorry. Without a reservation, there is only a room for two.” Too perfectly, he found himself in the same room he’d once shared with Martine. High up, on the top floor, amidst the gulls on the grey rooftops, the windows of the garret across from him where now a woman sat applying her mascara, and a little girl tinkled away at a piano. A rooftop is a basement in reverse, he thought: an angel’s place for hiding things.

At dusk, after a long sleep, he went out into the Jardin du Luxembourg, and stopped for coffee and pastries at the place where they’d gone for a final treat. She’d been blinking a lot, as if to pretend she wasn’t upset. “It’s almost as if you only trust what you can explain. It should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?”

The next morning, he arrived at the institute at nine-forty-five, having threaded his way through the industrial landscape with its slogans of hate and violent partisanship, the passions of the bazaar alive here along the Seine, around the corner from the Notre Dame, the university. The professor had suggested they meet at the top, and as he rose through floor after floor in the elevator, rising through Mitterrand’s folly, he felt as if he were a character in some inscription, ascending along the walls of what seemed one great passage from the Quran. Until, at the top, the message ran out, and there was nothing but the sky.

He looked out from the rooftop at the steeples and spires studded across the grey skyline, their crosses like headstones in some cemetery built above the clouds. Around him, the canvas umbrellas at the tables, white and folded, looked like nuns huddled in the rain, all the more so as bells began pealing hosannas from the nearby church.

Inside the spacy grey cafeteria where the man had told him to appear, the hexagons and stars from the patterned windows threw strange shadows across the floor, and he felt more than ever as if he were a cipher in some geometrical design, who had meaning only if put together with the coats lined up on the racks, the modular chairs, the woven shadows. “Sometimes you are inside a circle when you think you are outside it”: the unsettling words of the stranger in Seville.

The room was not very crowded at this early hour, and he did not imagine it would be difficult to spot the itinerant scholar. An elegant Frenchwoman was sitting alone at one table, throwing her Eastern shawl across one shoulder as she paged through a fashion magazine, brown eyes stylishly lined with kohl (he saw Sophie in a future life). At another table, a group of men from the Middle East were huddled together in dark jackets and grey trousers, as if chatting about the latest threat in Jerusalem, or Homs. The professor, when he came in a few minutes later, belonged to another order: cream sweater, aviator glasses, and a worn leather book-bag over his shoulder. His well-coiffed hair was grey, and his jacket, light for summer, was obviously expensive.

“So—you have ordered already?”

“I waited. What can I get you?”

“
Café,
only.” He put down his things and said, “Monsieur Hussein is your friend?”

“Acquaintance. I went to look at his manuscript—a little before you did, I think.”

“Ah yes, the manuscript.”

The mint tea, the
café au lait
arrived, and he felt the man waiting for a prompt.

“As I said over the phone, I’ve actually found myself changing places with Mr. Hussein. I’m now where he was.”

“You have a manuscript?”

“I have something. Whether it’s a manuscript or not—”

“Yes, of course,” said the man. “Perhaps I cannot help, but I am interested.”

He pulled out the four pages of photocopies and passed them over; if everyone he consulted saw the same pages, he could read each one’s level of involvement.

The man took off his glasses, “YSL” on their sides, rubbed his eyes, and put them on again.

He sipped his tea, and waited for an answer.

“This is in confidence, no?”

“Of course. I’m grateful to you for even looking at them.”

“Of course.” A small, elegant bow. “What do you think they are?”

“I honestly don’t know. Some, as you can see, are Rumi; the others, I don’t know.”

“I, too. They are interesting, certainly. They have the same flavor, the same spices, but the taste is different.”

“Exactly.”

“I would like to work with them. If you have the whole manuscript, perhaps you can give it to me and, three weeks, four weeks later, I send you an answer.”

The book had been a gift; and perhaps, too, a treasure. It was a private act, which somehow he was dragging into the public arena.

“The whole manuscript is in California at the moment. I’m reluctant to carry it around.”

“Of course. But for me, you understand, I cannot say anything with so little. You want my advice, but you cannot show me what you have. It is the
débâcle
of the times: Dzogchen sutras on the rue St.-Jacques.”

He looked up at the unusual phrase, and remembered where he’d seen it before: the fiery article on global scatterings that Mowbray had given him from the scholarly journal. By someone, he remembered now, who taught art history in Paris, and so was unfamiliar to him.

“I think I’ve read something of yours,” he said to the man. “ ‘Postmortems in the Postmodern Era,’ something like that.”

“Yes,” said the professor, shrugging, “a favor for a friend. A friend in America.”

“You wrote a whole article as a favor?”

“I let him use my name. The terms are his.”

“You had an arrangement?”

“A private arrangement,” said the man, as if that was the way to end the discussion.

“And in terms of my manuscript . . . ?”

“In terms of your manuscript, I wait till you give me everything, then I tell you what you have.”

“I’ll try to do that later. First I need to know if it’s authentic.”

The man stood up, his pride clearly bruised. “I thank you for the coffee,” he said, with more formality than was called for. “I think you need to talk to somebody else. I will ask Aisha Crespelle if she has time to see you.”

Wild Arabic music swirled out of the little shrine decorated in the shape of a peacock. Around him, once more, the kind of atmosphere he might have seen in the teahouse at the eastern entrance of the Umayyad Mosque: men in ancient jackets gathered over what seemed to be a perpetual argument; a grave old man alone, sipping at his tea as if wanting to stretch the cup out through a lifetime; a whirling, hypnotic melody that sang of love and desolation.

He thought of his adviser, planting articles in magazines, it seemed, much as he had planted Pauline in Arizona; getting professors in France to put their names on what he’d written, as he got small presses in Los Angeles to publish the pieces in English. For all he knew, Sefadhi was working through Camilla to give his prize student a manuscript that—nothing seemed impossible—his adviser had written himself.

Aisha Crespelle was dressed in a blue blazer and grey slacks and— what he hadn’t expected from her first name—had a healthy blond ponytail that spoke of a house in the country, riding lessons at dawn. He ordered tea for them both, and she looked back at him across the table in the Parisian way: appraising him sexually as much as socially, and hardly bothering to conceal her surprise at his relative youth and lack of funds.

“I imagine Professor Richy explained why I am here?”

“Of course,” she said. “He always does.”

The “always” wasn’t encouraging, but he pressed on: “My adviser, Javad Sefadhi, is second to none in his admiration of your work.”

“I thank him,” she said.

She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her bag as the tea arrived, and a thin gold lighter. At the next table, a noisy group of young girls from Scandinavia were untethering old backpacks.

“I hear you have poems. But what do you want me to do with them? Do I look at them and then pretend I’ve never seen them? You show me something beautiful, and then I never see it again?”

“I was thinking we might come to terms.”

“‘Come to terms,’” she said. “And if the poems are fakes, then what?”

“That’s a chance you have to take. If they’re fakes, I’ve come all the way from California in vain.”

“Why me? There are other people more eminent than myself. Maybe I will read your poems and then tell you they are worthless and make use of them myself ?”

“That’s a chance I have to take. Those doubts apply to anyone I might consult.”

“Show me what you have,” she said, tired of the fencing, and tipping her ash impatiently into the Cinzano tray. “Show me what you have so I can have some idea of it.”

“These are the only poems I have with me.”

“Yes,” she said, taking them from him, and then going through them once, twice, returning again and again to the second page. “Yes. These are something.”

“Something important?”

“Something different. What you should do with them, I can tell you without payment.”

He looked at her encouragingly.

“You burn them. Now. Before you leave Paris. If you keep the others in California, as soon as you return to California.” She took a long drag on her cigarette—smoking was how people in Paris punctuated their conversations. “The people to whom these poems belong have suffered already.” He’d guessed from her first name that she came from somewhere in the Middle East, and her watchfulness, her briskness said something about what she’d lived through. He thought back to the Iranians he’d met in Los Angeles, and the shards of a former life among which they tiptoed.

“These poems are like a bomb in a crowded square.”

“I realize that. I just wanted to know what they are exactly. For private reasons.”

“For private reasons you do not come to me.” She sat back and looked at him for a long moment.

“I have a friend,” she said, “an old friend from Tehran. One month ago, he goes back to collect the things he left in his house when he left. It is all gone—taken by a friend, an enemy, the police, some criminals, he doesn’t know. Then he goes to the airport to leave. ‘Sorry,’ they say as he’s leaving. ‘You are free to leave, but this little girl with you, she must stay.’ ‘But she is my daughter.’ ‘You say she is your daughter. How do we know she is not someone you are taking away from Iran?’ ‘I show you her passport, her papers. I give you the DNA.’ ‘We are sorry. You are free to go. But the girl, she must stay here.’ ”

She stubbed out her cigarette in the metal tray. “If you have a love letter, you do not take it to the government.” If someone whispers in your ear, you don’t ask a stranger what it means. Least of all in a country where whispers have repercussions.

Back in his little room, he picked up the postcard of the mosque he’d bought. He looked at it and looked out the window. Then, as if to renew an old hope he’d put away for a long time, he wrote on the back,

Wherever there is a ruin, there is a hope for
treasure.

—JALALUDDIN RUMI

When he got back to Santa Barbara, the only message waiting for him was from Sefadhi, speaking as if through clenched teeth. “In light of your new discovery, I have effected an extension of the fellowship; a stay of execution, if you like. The papers will be with the IRS soon. I hope you can put this year of grace to happy use.”

There were no letters in the mailbox, no faxes curling out of the machine. He put his carry-on back in the closet, and as he did so he saw, stacked in the corner, the letters from her he’d put where he wouldn’t see them. He bent down to pick one up, saw a face smiling at him through a windshield, and put the envelope quickly back.

The autumn days passed smoothly, tonelessly, and he began at last to pick up the pieces of his life and put them into a kind of order again: on Thursday nights tennis with Dick, movies once a week, and the trek to the library every morning at seven-forty-five. With an extension of twelve months, he could go back to the glass of wine in the terrace in the evenings, the occasional consultation of poems he hadn’t read for a long time. They’d run away from him when he looked at them again—as Sefadhi had, and Camilla; as he himself had, perhaps—but he was stirred by the same cadences he remembered from what seemed a previous lifetime.