Authors: Pico Iyer
It was three, four in the morning now, in his head, and they were on the bench by the river, under the trees, with all the punts moored up, banging now and then against the bank. The sound of a live band far away, under the tent, and only a few couples straggling across the lawns or stealing, periodically, through the great iron gates, into the quiet and privacy of the trees.
She was stretched out as she liked to sit, her feet in his lap, he playing with the straps of her sandals. They’d both drunk too much, and when he moved his fingers under her dress, she giggled and squeezed and said, “Don’t!” in a way that meant she didn’t want him to stop.
He ran his finger under the bottom of her legs, and then along the inside of her thigh, across the warm expanses, and she relaxed as she could never do indoors, and when the moment was over, she kissed him gently, and then they were farther apart than ever. The creakings on the lawns, the bottles scattered around the Cloisters, she pulling her legs sleepily back as soon as it was light, and saying, “I ought to go.”
“Me, too.”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s what you’re good at.”
“The scholarship stipulates . . .”
“I know what it stipulates: I’m the one who helped you fill out the application, remember? I just wish you had the decency to acknowledge the real reason why you’re going.”
He walked out into the night, to try to put the distant moment away—to come back to California—but all the memories now closed everything else out: the long, long evenings in the country when the sun just rested on the horizon forever, and the whole world dwindled into a murmurous quiet; cows on the hill, the two of them stretched out on the grass somewhere, a bottle on the blanket, and she, occasionally, saying, “How can you want anything but this? Aren’t you happy?”
No past and no future: just the suspended quiet of a summer evening that annulled a sense of direction and of self. Her eyes alight as it got dark, the bleary taste of wine upon her lips, the long nights when they never seemed to sleep. Until, of course, the past was so enormous that the only thing they shared was the sense of what they both wanted to avoid: it was as if the house they were building was coming apart, piece by piece, and brick by brick, and each day brought more packed boxes stacked up by the door. “If you mean there’s no patient Penelope to put it all together again in the morning,” she’d said, when he’d mentioned the feeling, “you’re probably right. I never was very interested in sewing.”
As he walked, a couple suddenly ran, singing, down the wooden steps of their home and out onto the beach. He watched them in the distance, running into the waves, hand in hand, and thought of the first letter he’d written her after he arrived. “Loneliness is a good thing, don’t you think?”
The next morning it was clear—none of the coastal fog that usually enveloped them till one, two in the afternoon—and when he went to his desk, his mind started to run in every direction except the one he wanted it to go in. Something in the trip had left him unsettled, not himself; not anything Khalil had said exactly, but all he hadn’t said. His reticence was so absolute, it gave the impression he had something to hide.
The scholar’s fear—he was reminded every time the latest issue of the
Journal of Islamic Studies
appeared inside his box—is the scholar’s dream, in a different key: that suddenly someone, somewhere, will make a discovery that turns the whole field on its head. If the discovery is his own, he can claim a victory of sorts, but even then it is a partial victory: every new development can turn years, even decades of research upside down. Like seeing a woman across a room, Alex had said, and throwing over your wife of twenty years.
He tried and tried to bring his mind back to the matter at hand— his paper next week at the graduate seminar—but a part of him was far away, and restless, the character in the fairy tale told, on no account, to look behind the last door on the second floor (and so unable to think of anything else). “The first line of Rumi’s
Mathnawi,
” he wrote now, but almost automatically, most of his mind in the maze-like streets of Old Damascus, “describes the cry of the flute, pining for the reed bed from which it was plucked. The Sufis, like all mystics, are singers of a homesickness that is a kind of hope; all of us are exiles in the world, they tell us, longing to get back to the place that is our rightful home.”
Outside his window, the surfers at the point were riding the waves, masters of all they surveyed for a moment, and then abruptly vanishing from view, until they emerged again, in a scramble of pale limbs and bobbing boards, their bodies washed towards the shore like so many pieces of laughing debris.
“For the Sufis,” he went on, trying to push himself back to the paper in front of him, “the heart of life is mystery: everything we don’t know. We are even mysterious to ourselves, they believe: a part of us going through the rituals of our daily life, while another part, a deeper part, cries out for whatever it is that can take us back. The stranger whose voice we recognize as our own.”
He stopped again, and got up to stretch his limbs. It was the whole point of the exercise, in a way: to learn to keep yourself out of what has been the consuming passion of your life. The scholar is trained to give himself over to a piece of paper, a riddle—an ancient crux—for years at a time, and told in the same breath to keep his feelings to himself: it is a training in living in the shadows.
He went out into the street now—anything to be free of the paper—and watched the usual dawdle of shirtless boys cycling past, and girls with ponytails flopping against their backs as they jogged. In his mailbox, for the first time in several days, a letter was visible through the slot, and when he pulled it out he saw a pale-blue envelope, Hafez Assad glowering in two colors from the right-hand corner.
Inside—he tore it open as he walked back into the room—was just a single thin piece of paper, the faded black seal of the Institute of Religious Studies in Damascus at the top. The short message looked like it had been tapped out on a manual typewriter almost as old as its owner:
Dr. Macmillan:
Javad tells me I was inexcusably rude when we met. I apologize. We have lost the habit of courtesy in my country. Conversation is something we fear—there is nothing good that can come of it. However, if I cannot help you in your researches, I recommend to you Professor Espinoza in Cádiz. He has spent many years tracing the flight of alleged manuscripts from our poets. I further recommend you make no mention of this to Javad. He and Professor Espinoza do not see the same way on many things.
I hope this begins to make up for my lack of hospitality before.
Your obedient servant in God,
Adnan Khalil
He felt a quickening inside him, as when a door swings slowly open and you see a shiver of light behind it. He saw the old man in his dark room, the framed prints on his shelves, the dusty books inside the case. He heard the man speaking in code everywhere he went, the only safety he knew, no doubt, in the company of his poems. Then he reached for his address book, to write the new contact down—and realized, fumbling in the pocket where he always kept it, that it was gone. Since the trip to the Middle East—or had it started before?—he’d seemed to mislay everything he cared about.
When he dialed the number on the card—he’d had to go back to his suitcase again and sift through the row of books to retrieve it—a woman’s voice came briskly on, and announced, “This is 964-3271. Please leave a message at the tone.”
“I’m really sorry to bother you again,” he began. “You won’t believe this—” And then, suddenly, she was there, like someone who’d been waiting for him.
“Hi.”
“Hi. I really apologize, you’re not going to believe it—”
“I know. I’ve got it here.”
“You found it?”
“You left it on the counter. I found it as soon as you left. But I didn’t know how to find you, so I was waiting for your call. It looks like your whole life is in here.”
“I think it is. Is there some time I could come by and collect it?”
“Name your time.”
When he pulled up to the small blue house a few hours later—he noticed with relief that the car was in the driveway this time—he heard her calling, “Over here. By the side.” When he arrived at the door through which she’d let him in before, she turned over whatever she’d been reading, as if anxious lest he see the title.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am. If I’d lost this . . .”
“I know. You’d have lost everything.” She got up and handed over the small address book.
“Well, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”
“I’m not doing anything. Are you?”
“Well, I’ve barged in on you twice in a few days, and . . .”
“That’s fine. But you must be busy.” She looked up at him and he saw, suddenly, someone with nowhere to go, living in somebody else’s house and collecting the presents that people brought from faroff countries for Miss Jensen (“No: the other Miss Jensen”).
“I’ve got something I have to do this evening.”
“Good,” she said, “so do I,” though he felt, with a pang, that it wasn’t true: she didn’t have anything to do anytime soon.
“Would you like to go for a drive?” she went on in her vague way. “It looks really pretty out today.”
“Sure. Why not?” He’d told himself, on coming to America, that he’d try to learn to be more open; the West was the land of unexplored horizons.
“Just give me a minute,” she said, and he found himself alone at the half-closed door, waiting and waiting (she hadn’t invited him in, he noticed), while Martine came into his mind again: suddenly, after all this time, she was everywhere. “It’s almost as if you’re hiding out behind your life.” The Cloisters on a winter morning, their breath making ghostly circles in the air. “The poems, the strict routine, the books on your desk—it’s all a way of keeping yourself away from what you really feel.”
“That’s why I’m going to America,” he’d said, and she’d looked back at him as if he’d truly disappointed her, by closing the wrong door. Now, at last—it had been a long wait—the door before him opened, and the young woman came out, transformed: in a long white dress, with a dab of blusher to brighten up her cheeks, her hair let down to frame her frightened eyes. He thought, inexplicably, of the time a student had asked him for an appointment, to discuss her paper, and when she’d opened her diary, he’d noticed that all the pages were white, unclaimed.
“So—where would you like to go?” he said, not sure of what the protocol for this demanded.
“Anywhere would be great. Can we go up to the mountains?”
It was a surprising request—the mountains were so close, she could get there in ten minutes—but he looked again at her lumbering car, ill-suited, perhaps, to such ascents, and then opened his door for her, and drove along the foothills to the north. When they turned right onto the Pass, they began to climb the road that eventually cuts across the mountains and down into the valley beyond.
“When I was in England,” she was saying as they rose, and he heard a blur of parties at Magdalen and lectures on Gertrude Bell, the time she’d gone to Paris to see some Ottoman prints, the class she’d taken on women on the Silk Road. It was as if she were playing a role, and one that she had calculated would play well with him, and yet one that made no sense in the context of her life. “I guess that’s why England was such a liberation,” she said, as the town began to fall away behind them, and they climbed and climbed, the hills below them dry and bare. At the top of the Pass, where it begins to descend towards the inland valley, he turned right, along the “Road of the Heavens,” which twists and snakes along the top of the range all the way to Montecito in the south, and suddenly, as so often here, the weather turned, and they were in clouds so thick they could hardly see a few feet ahead of them.
“You never know what it’s going to be like here,” he said. “Like two different countries, almost.”
“We’ve risen so high, so fast.” She peered out into the fast-moving mist as if happy to be somewhere murky again, in the presence of chill. “It wasn’t just testosterone, and people talking about their résumés,” she went on, and he remembered that she was in the middle of explaining England to him. “It was as if people knew where they were going.”
The trees were very close to them now, on both sides of the narrow road, and in the fog they seemed closer still, the only shapes they could make out in the grey, the only tokens of something real. The world had lost dimension here, and order, and even though he put on his lights, they could still see nothing but mist, an imminence of rain. Every slow turn and mountain curve bringing some new shifting prospect.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it would be like this.”
“I’m not. It’s amazing. Romantic. Mysterious.”
As they edged along the road, they found themselves navigating between great boulders on the hill above, and sudden, plunging falls to the other side. Occasionally, through the clouds, the city showed up, shining, with the sea a rich blue behind, and the islands in the distance. Then the clouds would be everywhere again, and they would be alone with great stone markers, the outline of hillside brush. Here and there they could see a house above, someone’s expensive dream constructed in the mist.
“This reminds me of the stories I used to read when I was a child,” she said. “About transformation and magic doors and people who went through these hidden doors and came upon a hidden world.”