Abandon (49 page)

He went out towards the main square again—the bridges illuminated after nightfall, so they seemed more than ever like props from fairy tale—and as he walked through the riddle of streets around the hotel, he caught smells of cooking from some kitchen, saw men seated in a circle on the floor, heard the slap of backgammon tiles from the cafés where the old men crouched over heavy wooden boards. Children ran this way and that in the dark, playing hide-and-seek or tag; a radio crackled from some far-off alleyway.

There was almost no one in the main square at this hour; only, in the distance, a few dim figures, just visible, drifting into the mosque for the day’s last prayers. He sat on a bench and thought how his life and hers were threaded together like overlapping skeins in a carpet, as she’d said long before: the lecture the first afternoon, Oxford before that, all the other unexpected convergences that culminated here, in the city they’d both been thinking of, for different reasons, for so long.

“Hello, sir.”

He turned around to see a young man beside him. In tight blue jeans and a black leather jacket; of college age, perhaps, careful not to get too close.

“Hello, sir. Where do you come from?”

“From England,” he said, so taken aback he forgot the cover story they’d agreed on in advance.

“England, number one!” said the boy. Green eyes and a faintly feminine air.

He looked around them and realized there was no way out; the boy had timed his approach for when no one else was around.

“You like Isfahan, sir?”

“Very much, thank you.”

“You come to our country many times?”

“This is the first. But I’d like to come back.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the boy, with a small bow. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then the boy again: “You stay one days, two days, in Isfahan?”

“A few. I leave tomorrow. You?”

“I am Isfahani, sir. I am student of your English.”

They fell quiet again—they were linked now, but neither of them could think of anything to say—and then the boy said, “You come to my house, sir.” It wasn’t quite a statement, but it wasn’t a question, either. He looked more closely at the boy but couldn’t tell what lay behind the offer: maybe it was just the fact that he was alone (since, so long as he was with a woman, no one would ever invite them home)?

“Is it far?”

“Not far, sir. Close.”

He looked at the boy and thought: if not now, when? The answer to his questions would not come in the streets.

They got up and walked together, away from the center, he trying to follow the names so he could find his way back, if need be, and the boy asking him about Michael Jackson, the Dream Team in Barcelona. They passed through a maze of dusty lanes—a figure called out to the boy from one of them, there was a group of boys in the dark in another—and he thought of the boys they’d seen in the streets this afternoon, agents, they’d agreed, for the regime’s dirty work. (What teenager in Iran would have a room of his own, unless he had a high-up sponsor?)

Finally, the boy stopped at a small black door, and ran up the steps inside it. He came after, smelling something rotting, fumbling against the wall in the dark.

At the top of the stairs was a square, empty room fit for an ascetic. On one wall, a torn calendar of Mecca; on another, wrapped in fine cloth on a shelf, what he took to be a Quran.

“You take tea,” said the boy, and before he could embark on the three-part refusal—let alone say no—the boy was gone, leaving him alone with the signs of devotion. The massed crowds around the Qa’ba on the poster, the paint peeling from the walls. Then the boy returned with two muddy glasses and a torn old bag of Oreos (his cousin in Los Angeles, he explained with pride).

They talked in a desultory way of the World Cup, Madonna— “You know Michael Jordan?” the boy asked—and then, as if this had been the point of the whole meeting, the boy said, shyly, “You like poems, sir?”

“I do, as a matter of fact, yes.”

“Please.” His host rummaged through a sheaf of papers under his low table and then extended a scrap of notepaper, its edges torn. “I made into the English,” he explained.

I am made mad by the beauty spot above your lips, my love,

I see your eye and fall sick.

Open the cellar door to me, every day, every night,

I do not like the mosque or the seminary.

“Like Hafez,” he said, not knowing what else to say, and the boy, pleased he’d caught the allusion to the mole, smiled and put his hand to his heart.

“Our Imam,” he said, and then opened a book he kept under the table to reveal a picture of the poem’s author, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The effect of the poem, no doubt inadvertent, was to tell him all he wouldn’t find in this small room—the folly, in fact, of even mentioning his own poems. They talked a little more about Hollywood, the cousin in Los Angeles, and then, saying something about “foreigners’ security restrictions” (the boy looked impressed), he got up and made his escape. When he came into the room, she was standing at the window, as if she’d been trying to imprint something on her memory.

“You find anything?”

“Nothing much.”

“I wish we could stay and stay,” she said, and then, as if she’d gone too far, she hurried to cover it up. “I mean, it’s nice here, safe.”

Shiraz was only a few hours away, but all the planes were booked, and their funds would not last forever. As they took their seats on the bus, he thought back to the first time he’d heard the name mentioned in the context of manuscripts, in Damascus, and felt that something at last was being brought to a close. If the lines on the star map converged anywhere, it was surely in the place where her father had been born, and many of the country’s most celebrated poets.

They were given the front seats, as before—the seats of honor, closest to the heater—and when he looked at her, by the window, he saw someone less encumbered than he’d ever seen in her before. It was as if the Camilla that he knew had been cleaned out in some way, purified; and he, too, perhaps, living simply in this alien place, and moving with more purpose. They couldn’t touch in public, of course; it wasn’t even wise to laugh or whisper together. But that meant they were back in a kind of innocence—the first nights, when they’d made love all night, she’d said once, without ever touching.

“It’s not like what you expected, either, is it?” she said, following his thoughts.

“No. Completely different.”

“Different better or different worse?”

“Better, I think. More friendly.”

“And someone else is doing the driving.”

He didn’t say anything for a long while, and then, “We get to take everything seriously here except ourselves.”

“You’re not wishing you were alone?” But the way she said it told him that she knew the answer already.

Behind them, the other passengers leaned forwards at times, as if to catch the words of a foreign language they couldn’t understand; they’d become celebrities of a kind here, or at least VIPs. More important, though, in this foreign place, they’d been brought together, as a couple. His interests were hers, her needs his.

The bus stopped at regular intervals, to let people off, to take new passengers on, and then they were in the desert again, no coordinates or signs for as far as they could see. Miles of emptiness and sand, and then the darkness began to fall, and they were in a place even farther from orientation or real life. The night outside unbroken by lights or trucks or dust storms. He looked out into the blackness till the night made her fall asleep, and then he, too, was asleep, woke up, fell asleep again, till suddenly there came a decisive jolt and the bus stopped moving altogether. He looked outside but could see nothing: the same night as before.

“What’s happening?” she said, as she woke up, too.

“I don’t know. We seem to have stopped.”

“What’s going on?”

From behind them came a great clattering, and then the other passengers began moving through the aisle and out into the dark. They stayed where they were, not knowing what was going on, and then, after a few minutes, they felt the bus being pushed on its side, almost as if it was about to be overturned.

“What’s happening?” she said again, the panic rising as he felt them off-balance, and then the bus landed on all fours again.

“I don’t know. It must be some kind of problem.”

“I know it’s a problem. But what’s going on?”

Around them the bus began rocking again, back and forth, as if the passengers were going to push it over, with them inside it. Then silence again, and nothing but the dark.

They remained where they were—to go out, into the foreign cold, seemed even more dangerous than staying in their seats—and then, at last, a man came in and said, “Excuse me. Broken. Tomorrow, Shiraz.”

He motioned for them to follow him, and they went out into the dark, their bags heavy in the night, to see the other passengers standing around or sitting in the emptiness while a couple of boys argued about something on the axle. It was cold, and there was nowhere to go in the dark.

A little later, as mysteriously as everything else here, a car arrived, and the man motioned for them to come with him, and they began jouncing away from the bus. After twenty minutes or so, they arrived at a small, empty square, with houses (or huts, really) on every side. It was silent as a ghost town. The man—the designated English-speaker, they gathered—went up to a door and knocked, and then there was another face there, and they were being led into a narrow, unlit corridor. A door was opened, and the man pointed them into a room as empty as a cell. He made the universal gesture of sleeping, then disappeared.

It was a small space, with a pile of stones in one corner, and a rolled-up carpet in another. Through the window came the moon above the small houses, the sound of the wind from the desert, the cold.

“I don’t like it,” she said, walking around as if to find some piece of consolation.

“I know. But I don’t think we’ve got much choice.”

“I thought you spoke good Farsi.”

“When I’m at home, perhaps, with my books.”

They sat against a bare wall, and the wind rose up again outside. He put his arm around her, she tried to sleep. But every time she stirred, he started from his sleep. Every time he woke up from a brief dream, she did, too. The night went on and on, and the first light never seemed to come.

When he awoke, with a start, in the morning, it was to see the man from the night before bending over them, motioning urgently at his watch. She struggled up, face pale, and he saw, as he looked at her, that something had gone out of her in the night: she was the person she was in California, haunted, and more vulnerable than ever now that she was far from everything she knew.

“You’re okay?” he said when they were ushered into the car. She nodded, but it was as if some guardian spirit in her had gone away; she’d seen the other side of her father’s legacy. At the bus, a boy hurried up to them with two dirty glasses of tea and a handful of crumbling biscuits; they looked around and realized that their fellow passengers had spent the whole night here, sleeping in the sand if they slept at all. Everyone got back in now, and the bus started up, as if it were the beginning of a new journey. But she said almost nothing in answer to his questions, and looked out of the window dazed.

When they got to Shiraz, he got a room for them in the best hotel in town, and found a Buick to take them around, but at some level it was all too late; she hardly even smiled when the boys near the university, fluent in their English, chattered away, and one of them opened a book to show them a sentence translated into their own language: “Truth shows her face, her very beautiful face, in a veil. Only the travelers who go to other places can see her.” The mystical sentiments of the coming man, Khatami.

“We’ll go back tomorrow,” he said, once they were back in the safety of the hotel. “Take the bus back to Tehran, find a room for the night in Qom, and take the next flight out.”

The Revolution had given a kind of luster to romance, a secret charge, by pushing it underground, and in the hours before it was dark, when they went to Hafez’s tomb, they found it was more full of courting couples than it might have been a generation before. The boys and girls sat here and there on the grass, eating rosewater ice cream, and now and then a pair would go up to the small, serene white pavilion and tell their futures there.

“You want to try?”

“I guess.” She could never resist a game, he knew; and when he handed her one of the books behind the tomb of the mystical poet, she closed her eyes and flipped through the pages, then jammed a finger down.

“A little farther. You’re between the lines.”

She pushed her finger down, and he said, “There. You’re on a sentence now.”

She opened her eyes. “What does it say?”

“It says”—he paused, perhaps for effect, or because the Farsi was difficult—“it says, ‘The adventure between me and my Beloved never ends. What has no beginning can have no end.’ ”

She looked at him. “How do I know you’re not making it up?”

“You don’t. You have to trust me.”

The next morning, when he awoke, it was to see her, once again, at the window, as if she were tracing with her mind the streets her father might have gone down when young. And, in the process, putting away whatever had frightened her in the empty room.