Abandon (18 page)

“A complicated field,” said Sefadhi, jangling a few nuts from the small white bowl in his palm as he spoke. “I never really told you, I think, about Leila.”

“Your first wife?”

“My only wife.” A flash of steel behind the curtain. “The reason I’m here. The official reason, at least: SOAS, California, my life in the West”—he contrived to give the last phrase the feeling of inverted commas—“the whole thing.”

“She worked here, I think I heard. Or studied here at least.”

“Worked, yes. After a fashion. Before I knew her. By the time we met, she was in London, at the embassy.”

“A diplomat?”

“In a sense. In London she was first secretary.”

It was unclear to him why Sefadhi was saying any of this; the more he said, the less clear it was why he was saying anything at all.

Then, playing with his stirrer, and rubbing his hands together to rid them of the dust of almonds, he said, “What you have before you, John, is that most implausible of figures in your English spy novels, the unsuspecting husband of a spy.”

“That can’t be.”

“Why not? We always had a large presence in London; it was there long before Mossadegh. Many of our people were working covertly. And I, a student, became that unhappiest of clichés, a spy’s half-knowing spouse. A funny thing to be, in both senses of your word.”

“Everything okay with you gentlemen tonight?”

The waiter was standing at their side—he’d seen that the older man’s glass was empty—and Sefadhi, shaken from his story, ordered a second soda water while his student shook his head no. Around them, as the wind blew in from the sea, the waiters were bowing down to try to light a candle on every table.

“As you can imagine, it was not easy. I could ask nothing, I could know nothing. When she was late at the office, when she was called away to an overseas trip; when she went out and didn’t come back for three days . . .” The new drinks arrived, and he paused. “Of everything I could know nothing.”

When someone entrusts you with a secret—this had been Alex’s wisdom, years before—he’s trying, as often as not, to keep you from some deeper secret. If someone tells you he’s the husband of a spy, it may be a way of keeping you from thinking that he’s a spy himself.

“So you never knew anything?”

“Nothing. If she took meetings in a hotel, if she went suddenly to Europe, if she disappeared without a word, I could know nothing. It was nothing dangerous or difficult, she used to tell me, but it was better for me to keep my innocence.”

He said nothing, so Sefadhi would continue, but his adviser seemed to need no prompting.

“She could have been enjoying a contact that was ‘extracurricular,’ in your words. She could have been making deals with Iraq, with Hafez Assad. She could have been reporting on me to the authorities. I never even saw her passport.”

“And this went on a long time?”

“I met her in ’73. It ended in ’79.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She was called back to Tehran, shortly before the change in government. I never heard from her again.”

“You don’t even know if she’s alive?”

“I know nothing. If I am a married man; if I can take another wife. What happened to her house near the Winter Palace—she used to show me pictures. Her grandparents near the border, the cinema they ran. Nothing. It’s better, perhaps. If I knew something, it would be worse. If we had both been in Tehran in ’79 . . .” and then his voice trailed off, even his grammar and syntax falling away.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then, feeling that his teacher was waiting for him to draw some conclusion, he said, “There’s a virtue in keeping quiet.”

“A virtue in remembering what you’re up against.” Sefadhi sounded like himself now, as if they were back in his office. “These men are not gentlemen.”

“Things have consequences, in other words.”

“Always. Unintended consequences.”

The older man drained his second glass quickly and then called for the bill; when it came, he drew out a black pen with gold trimming, elegant even in this casual meeting. “I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself,” he said, as he calculated the tip and signed. “A private consultation between student and teacher.”

“Of course.”

They got up, and as they began walking out, suddenly the older man slipped, and grabbed onto the tablecloth to keep himself from falling. A glass of water spilled its contents across his sweater.

When he came out into the parking lot, more steady now, it was as if the man so in command of things in the office had been replaced by someone more faltering, more poignant; someone not sure of what part he was meant to play. “Next time, our usual place, our usual hour,” said Sefadhi, collecting himself as he went over to his car. As he unlocked the door, the older man seemed to be shivering a little in the winter night.

When he got home, unable now to settle to the reading he’d promised himself, he pulled out a piece of paper from the bottom drawer and, in the precise and meticulous way that Sefadhi himself had taught him, began to make a diagram of the forces gathering in his life, a “star map,” as his adviser would have called it.

On the one side, there was Khalil, who’d somehow led to Kristina, then Camilla, and then whatever lay beyond Camilla; on the other, the men from Westwood, the strange fanatic in Seville, whoever called him up to say nothing, or sent him unsigned faxes. As he looked down, it seemed that the drawing was beginning to look like a maze, one of those puzzles Camilla so loved to toy with. How thread your way to the center without repeating your steps at any point? And how link one side to the other without noticing that the only thing they have in common is the one person you tell yourself you are not growing closer to?

“Make a list of what’s important”—it had been Sefadhi’s injunction, in his first year here—“and then eliminate from the bottom.”

He drew out a piece of blue letter paper from his desk and began to write.

Dear Benedict (if I may, after all these years),

It’s been a long time since I was last in touch and I know that generations of new disciples must be clamoring at your door. But I did want to say hello again, after all this time, and to tell you how things are going over here. Also (as you’ve no doubt guessed), to solicit your advice on something: you can be assured I’m not completely disinterested.

You told me when I chose to go to SOAS, and implied the same when I asked for the reference for the Scholarship, that I should be ready for a “hall of mirrors,” as I think you called it. I was, of course I said, and of course, as usual, I didn’t know the first thing about what I was getting into. I never realized what a strong division separates those who are party to this world from those who aren’t. I feel at times like a kind of neophyte in some kind of Underworld. Except that the Underworld is the real world, and I have to find my way in it. Like when I was in Damascus, not long ago, and every little lane I turned into in the Old City seemed to have a blue sign on it that said “Cul-de-saque.” Wasn’t it you who told me that in medieval Cairo half the roads were cul-de-sacs?

In any case, the images are catching, rather, and one doesn’t know where to stop. But the reason I’m writing now is that I’ve begun hearing, here and there, about certain manuscripts, not widely known of in the West, that might have come out of Iran in recent years. They could be in France, though more likely they’re somewhere here in California. People seem so reticent about them that I’m sure there must be something there—even if I’m hardly the person to make sense of it all. Those who care about the manuscripts, of course, as well as those in possession of them, all have considerable reason to keep their cards very close to their chests and to keep them out of public view.

I know this isn’t strictly your field, and I realize I’m not giving you very much to go on. But if I did come upon one of these anthologies, what exactly would I do with it? Especially when others regard the texts as a matter of life and death. I suppose I come to you largely because you’re not in the field: you’re an innocent, in that way. Everyone else has an agenda, to the point where one is least inclined to trust the people closest to one.

Might you have time for a chat when next I’m in England? I don’t know when that will be, but for now I wish you and of course Miss Mowbray all happiness and health. I also hope you’ll enlighten us on St. Teresa. What was she doing on all those long nights alone? I hope you’ll tell us.

With every best wish,
John Macmillan

Then, picking up the telephone, and looking again at the list he’d drawn up, he dialed her number and when he heard the voice again on the answering machine—“This is 437-2962. Talk!”—said quickly, directly, “Camilla, I’m going on a trip, up north. Any chance of your being free for a small adventure?”

The next day, she arrived just as it was getting light—in her ineffable fashion, the only way she could find to meet him in the morning was by driving through the night and then camping out near his house until dawn. The sensible thing would have been for her just to come and stay overnight, but already they were both moving warily around the memories of dinner appointments lost, his waiting and her worrying. To be insanely early seemed safer all around than being dangerously late.

She piled her things into the back of his car—things and more things—and then they headed north, past the last stretch of undeveloped beach in the area, driving through almost rural parts of suburbia, and great meadows that ran along the freeway, the sea beyond the train tracks blue. After a hundred miles or so, the road trickled into the coastal highway again, and they drove along a single-lane emptiness, with cows grazing above the road to one side—placid as creatures from an older world, going nowhere—and a lighthouse here and there set among the rocks and the foaming ocean on the other.

Long stretches of virgin beach ran along the cliffs, and the colors were primary and stark: green fields, high blue skies, patches of flowers, and the greenish sea. Years ago, in another world, this was the place he’d dreamed of when he thought of California: a territory still unclaimed where people lived among eternities. No history, no tradition, no society, no preordination: only whatever the rocks and the light and the changeable sky seemed to determine.

At his side, he thought, someone who longed for nothing but history and tradition and a role: someone who had even become an actress so that people would tell her what to say and do, as if she could escape from a haunted house into a studio apartment that was empty, ready to be furnished according to someone else’s taste. She put on a cassette of Celtic folk music, looked out at the expansive sky, the rocks and sense of unvisited space. He felt as if something at last was moving forward: with each mile away from Los Angeles, she grew younger and freer, more full of animation. As if, in some child’s coloring book, the outline of a face was being filled now, and made piquant, by red, yellow, gold.

As the road climbed and ran high above the ocean, the sense of spaciousness came and went, sometimes to their left nothing but clear air, not even a speck on the horizon in the distance; sometimes a sudden grove of trees, and a valley shadowing its darkness. Battered mailboxes in front of torn fences, as if milestones in the wilderness, and the lowering of trees making each sudden expanse of space and light a quickening.

Finally, the trees and the shade grew more intense, and, after crossing a creek, everything woody now and gold, green and brown, the floating surfaces of Southern California far behind them, they pulled off at a little inn, tucked into a grove of redwoods. You could hear the gurgling of the creek from every room. Tall trees moved back, back towards the mountains as if pulling you towards something ancestral. There was a sense here of being in one of those sleepy hollows along the coast—Pynchonland—where the real world is forgotten and one slips into some other order, behind the rolling mist and in the protection of old trees.

The meeting he’d fixed up was two hours farther north, so they followed the road up, the groves of trees thickening, enclosing them from the world, and then suddenly giving way to sunlit fields, a silver road above the cliffs, and great suspension bridges that seemed to bring them back into the world of men and moments.

Then, as they began winding around the small rural trails that run like whims or quickly arrested thoughts around the Santa Cruz mountains, he veered right onto a dirt path—she reading the instructions he’d taken down over the phone—and, bumping along a pot-holed road, came at last to a small house built in a dark grove of trees. An aging Citroën and a motorbike were parked outside; a trailer ran alongside the main house; and behind it, as if it were a back room entered only by invitation, stood the woods.

Talmacz was waiting for them, sitting on his porch nursing a beer and looking more like a rancher than a translator of Islamic poems. His yellow hair fell to his shoulders, and his shirt was partially unbuttoned; he seemed closer to the woods than to any library one might imagine.

“Come in,” he said, “you’re just in time.”

They followed him through into a cozy rustic room—rocking chairs and pillows and a few Islamic rugs here and there, eyetooth locks on the wooden doors as in a fairy tale.

“What are you drinking?”

He brought back a beer and a glass of wine and sat back in his rocking chair, moving with a deliberateness that enforced their distance from L.A.