Authors: Pico Iyer
“What would you like to do tonight?” he said as she stirred. Darkness everywhere outside and the beach was emptied out. Shouts, footsteps disappeared, and the silence took over around this time.
“Can we go somewhere?”
“Anywhere in particular?”
“You told me about your friend’s house, downtown. With a tower.”
It had been months ago, on one of their first drives, and he’d happened to mention Bill’s Victorian house near the center of town, with its aerie at the top. “It’s like a bird’s nest,” he’d said, and her face had lit up, and then he had forgotten all about it.
“Can we go there now?”
He rang up to see where Bill might be, and the answering machine was a blank: as a restorer of old sculptures, his friend was often gone for months at a time, and every now and then a call would come, from Oaxaca, or Florence, once from Siem Reap, asking him if he could use his spare key and go into the house to find something.
They drove through the dark to the center of town, the Moorish cinema lighted up just behind them, and went in the old Victorian house through the back door. It still had an old formality—doors and divisions marked out in a nineteenth-century way, and a parlor where a lady might play the piano, a back room where an Emily Dickinson might write her poems.
He led her through the building to the stairs and then up the red carpet to the landing, filled with nothing but books. “He’s in Art History,” he explained. “It’s his idea of decoration.” Then up a much narrower set of stairs, bare wood and turns, till they came to what might have been an attic.
It was a small hexagonal room, with windows on four of its six sides. The lights of the town came in through three of them, houses on the hills, sometimes cars from the road below. Through a fourth, the pier in the distance and the sea. He turned on a light, and they were in a universe of two. “No,” she said, “it’s better without.” There was just enough light from the street to make sure they wouldn’t fall.
“It’s like a treehouse,” she said, walking round it, while he sat back. “Except more comfortable.”
“And this time you’re not alone in it.”
She stopped and sat in the middle of the room, and he left her to her thoughts, sitting against a wall. Then, after they had been silent in the dark room for some minutes, she stood up and came back to where he was sitting, and, kneeling down at his side, began kissing him all over, his lips, his neck, through the shirt she began unbuttoning.
“What is it? You don’t have to . . .”
She pulled her white dress over her head and began pulling the pins out of her hair.
“It’s all right, Camel. I’m happy to be quiet.”
She shook her hair free and looked down at him. Her face was without color, and she looked more unprotected than he’d ever seen her. She began kissing his chest, his nipples, down his stomach. He felt the tears all over her face and the cheeks wet where they grazed him: someone pretending to be her again.
She shivered as she settled herself on top of him, and then, after many moments in the silence, in the dark, she got up and picked up her dress, put it on quickly without a sound.
When they were back home, she put her things together, as if to leave.
“Is there a funeral?”
“I don’t know. I’m still in hiding.” But if she were hiding, he thought, she would surely be anywhere other than Los Angeles, and the memory of her father, her waiting mother.
“Do you need company? A bodyguard? A semi-professional escort?”
“I need nothing, thank you.” She’d already disappeared into the person she would be at the other end. “You’ve given me plenty, thank you.”
The days went slowly now that they were empty. He didn’t want to give Sefadhi more details about the new manuscript, and Alex was wary and cordial since their meeting over a common girlfriend. The book in the bank and the woman who’d come to visit were safe in their mysteries, and both of them, at some level, seemed to ask him not to ask too much.
One of the new habits he’d made in the new year was to go to the library every Monday to read the exile papers from Los Angeles: a way of keeping his Farsi up, he thought, and keeping in touch with the émigré community with which he’d begun to feel such sympathy. When he picked up the
Iran Daily News,
a few days after her unexpected visit, it was to see the usual black-and-white pictures of balding travel agents, and announcements of concerts featuring favorites from the old days. At the very bottom of the front page, though, there was something that caught his eyes, as if it was half familiar.
“ESTEEMED PROFESSOR DIES,” the small headline said, and its short, formulaic text read:
Professor Ferdows Azadeh was born in Shiraz in 1938. Educated at the University of Tehran, he was a professor of astronomy at the same university until his migration to the United States in 1978. Here he was a much-loved and respected member of the Westwood community known for his solemn observation of ancient Islamic custom and serious commitment to the cause of a free and democratic Iran. “He was the soul and spirit of our circle,” said Parviz Rastegar, a longtime friend and academic colleague, who worked with Professor Azadeh in many activities. “He knew the name of every star, in English, Arabic, and Persian. When he wrote poems, his friends would weep.”
Azadeh is survived by his wife, Katrina Jensen, of Los Angeles, and two daughters, Kristina, of Santa Barbara, and Camilla, of Los Angeles.
“My father’s from—somewhere else,” she’d said, that first day in the kitchen; all the tales she told were of her mother’s home, in Denmark. Physically, clearly, she was her mother’s daughter, to a fault; for all he knew, the man who seemed to have come to the U.S. a few years after her birth might not even have been her father by blood. But Kristina, he remembered, had that rich dark hair, the splashes of color, you might expect to find in the northern suburbs of Tehran. Even the casual elegance.
He went back to the first time he’d knowingly been in the same room as she was, at McCarthy’s lecture. He remembered, suddenly, her interest in the Iranian lecture, the fact she’d known how to find the dervishes. All the forgotten lore she’d sometimes pull out from her college days about Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. In the house, during the long, rainy interlude, her sudden rage when he’d spoken of Isfahan.
The white dress, he thought now: a Persian color of mourning. The body buried within twenty-four hours, as specified by the Quran, and then perhaps a eulogy at the mosque three days later, and a ceremony forty days after the death. The cards she’d brought, always from Persia; Sefadhi’s passing reference (or had it been in Seville?) to someone called “Ferdows,” connected with the poems in some way.
Even her silences became a little clearer now, all the things she couldn’t tell him, lest to do so would be to give him another confused reason to be drawn to her. She’d told him how she wanted to flee everything associated with her parents; and yet another part of her, her blood, surely propelled her towards what she knew to be her birthright. He saw her sitting alone, now, in the city that was most frightening to her; he looked at his own calendar, with its long spaces of unclaimed openness; and then, picking out a piece of paper, he began to put down something he’d been thinking of for a very long time.
Dearest Camilla,
I wish I could do something or say something that would make it all better, take you out of whatever loneliness or sadness you must be feeling now. I wish I could wave some wand or say some spell that would make it all go away. But I don’t think I can. I could tell you how it felt when my own parents went away, but every loss is particular, and I don’t think any words can really be much help. That’s one of the things I’ve learned from you.
All I can say is that I’m here if you need me, or if you’re looking for somewhere to get better. And we’ve worked so hard to build something up outside ourselves, it would be a shame— more than a shame—to let it go uncared for. It would be like locking ourselves out of our abandoned house in the hills. I know I’ve done nothing to draw you out of hiding; probably, being me, I’ve only succeeded in pushing you even farther into hiding. And I haven’t won your trust—I haven’t even earned it. I’m only just beginning to see all the things I couldn’t see before, running off in search of manuscripts when something much more valuable, more meaningful, was in my arms.
You’ll expect me now to start bombarding you with questions, about your father and Iran and all the parts of your life I never knew about before. I want to know the answers to all that as much as you’d expect. But another part of me—maybe this is your influence, too—feels that none of that would really answer anything. It would only be just another kind of diversion, more information to keep me away from what matters.
So—all, I will say is, ‘Come with me to Persia.’ Not for a long time, and not with any itinerary that’s going to sound too daunting. I can take care of the arrangements, the expenses (I’ve still got all that leftover money from the Fellowship); all you need do is bring yourself. It’s a trip I’ve been wanting to take for a long time, for obvious reasons, and now I can see it’s the trip you need to take, too. Now that one cycle’s ending, it’s the way to start a new one. A better one.
I know what you’re going to say to this: that I’ve really lost it now. Iran is the last place you want to go—a country run by madmen who’ve destroyed every last civility of an ancient culture. A place dangerous emotionally and in every other way, especially for someone with her roots there.
But unless we do go there, I think, we’ll always be stuck in some way; unable to move forward. If you stay where you are, you’ll never break through the patterns that you know; at least coming to Iran will make all the other places that you dream of that much closer. And if you don’t savor every moment, maybe you’ll look on L.A. a little differently when you return.
I won’t go on and on, especially at a time when you’ve got a million other things to consider, and must be feeling more vulnerable than ever. All I will say is that, if you can’t bring yourself to try this now, maybe we can find another destination, closer to home—somewhere where we can find something outside ourselves and our small concerns, the way we did in New Mexico. And if even that sounds too much, I will, though reluctantly, retreat in silence.
You know, though, whatever happens, that all I want for you is a place where you can feel safe. Your happiness is the secret of my own.
Love, truly,
John
Five days later—no answer yet—he took a greater chance, and drew out from his suitcase the card he’d brought back from Granada, of the Alhambra under moonlight.
Mas, en este abandono de los dos
en los dos, ¿qué nos dábamos?;
el brazo de la cruz de nuestro cruce,
¿qué flores y qué espinas
del camino infinito recojía?
—JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
Behind it another card, picked up in Westwood, of a traditional wedding in Tehran, the bride and groom sitting before a mirror, each watching his own and the other’s reflection, the only thing beside them on their platform—and in the mirror—a small Quran placed upon a prayer rug.
And yet, in this abandonment of both
in both, what did we give each other?
In the arms of the cross of our crossing,
what flowers and what thorns
did it gather on the road without end?
You’re the most persuasive person I’ve ever met,” she said when, finally, she called, though she didn’t make it sound like a compliment.
“I don’t want to persuade you to do anything. Just offer up an opportunity.”
“You see—you’re smoother than a politician.”
“Point taken. I’ll shut up.”
There was a pause on the other end, as if she was waiting for more persuasion from his end.
“It’s a war zone over there.”
“They’re not fighting any longer. I wouldn’t take you to a place that wasn’t safe.” He thought of her neighborhood in Los Angeles, the beaten-down bungalows, the broken stores, but let it go.
“And all that money?”
“I’ve got to spend it somehow, on something connected to my project. Once we get there, it’s incredibly cheap.”
“Why me?”
“You know the answer to that. I wanted to do it even before I heard about your father.”
“You see what I mean? You could get me to jump off into the Grand Canyon.”
“Only if I had a safety net at the other end.” He kept silent about her mother, let her come slowly to the decision by herself.
“I don’t expect you to say anything now. But if we do go, it’d be best to go soon, before the New Year there. The only condition is that we have one talk beforehand.”
They met at the little Mexican cantina on the short road that led to the beach, where once they’d heard the German women, and Sting lying down in fields of gold. The same three men with their pomaded hair were strolling around the same six or seven tables, closing their eyes to the chorus of “La Cucaracha,” while the same woman with tired yellow hair slapped orders on the carousel. A girl of eight or so walked from table to table, selling roses.
“The same table as before,” she said, as they took their places in the garden. “Neutral ground.”
She looked better than when last they had met, as if she’d gone down into the Underworld and now had come back up into the light. She had a solidity about her, even a self-possession, that she’d always tried to hide before.