Abandon (21 page)

There was nothing he could say to this; the man was his teacher, and born into the faith besides.

“You realize it’s all a fairy tale?” the older man said to him, as if holding his anger back. “You realize it means nothing, in the context of our thesis?”

“We have documentation for most of it,” he said feebly. “I haven’t departed from the record.”

“You haven’t departed in the few facts you choose to share with us. You spare us outright falsehoods. But to turn Attar—or any of his fellows—into a California surfer boy is worse than committing any falsehood. It is to translate him into a tongue in which he has no meaning.”

“I use his words, not my own.”

“And your meanings, not his own. For those who know and love this poet, what you’ve written is a kind of obscenity. Everything is there except what is everything to him: his God.” He paused to try to steady himself; both of them knew he was in no hurry to antagonize his most faithful student. “You have, if I may say so, smeared your own feelings all over him like a kind of paste. A graffito over the building he has taken pains to construct for us. You remember when I spoke about ‘textual rape’?”

He nodded and said nothing. Perhaps, he thought, his teacher was trying only to spare him from a grilling at more hostile hands, to give him a taste of what he might expect from the less sympathetic members of the Department. And perhaps his unease, volatile at the best of times, had been made acute by the confession at the beach, and all the sudden, unwanted talk of smuggled manuscripts. A part of this might just be personal, the moment and the mood talking. But the bulk of it, he knew, was not.

“You’ve worked hard on this, John, I realize that.” He was a doctor now, mapping out strategies at the dying patient’s bedside. “You have a perspective, even a depth of involvement, that is tonic. But you cannot turn these poets into mere carriers of fire without taking them away from everything that’s important to them. These poems are fragile things, esoteric in their way; to strip a text of a context is to leave nothing but a pretext.”

He recognized the line from a long-ago preface—Sefadhi’s own youthful excesses—but he felt he was in no position to answer back.

“What do you suggest, then? How can one begin to write about ‘mystery’ without trying in some fashion to unriddle it?”

“I suggest you keep your life quite separate from your studies. I further suggest you think of your audience: a generation of scholars training the next generation of scholars. I suggest that you leave your explanations behind and content yourself only with the words, the very particular words and meanings, of a poet whose meanings are far greater than you or I could aspire to. Rumi, Attar, Hafez, they are wise men in a complex tradition; please do not bring them onto your daytime television.”

Afterwards, there was nothing to say. He cycled back along the track, the light now going fast—the beach was already almost deserted— and, back in the house, it was all he could do to pour himself a drink and take it to a study that now seemed deeply empty, abandoned by its governing spirits. In his mind, arguments (lover’s arguments, lawyer’s arguments—the same) began to form: “If you weren’t so nervous about how Iran is seen in the West . . .”; “If you didn’t bring your own past and sufferings into this . . .”; “If you hadn’t been so wounded in love, and determined to box it out of your life . . .” But even he could see they were foolish, spiteful things that he had to say only so he could throw them away. He composed a four-page rebuttal to his teacher, and then put the treatise away in his desk and thought back on the evening just past. “You sound tired,” she said when she called, late that night. “Has something happened?”

“Nothing much. Just the usual labors with my thesis.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No. It’s just the usual departmental stuff. Nothing important.”

“If it were nothing important, you wouldn’t be sounding like that. I guess I’m not the only one who’s bound by pride.”

“I guess not. Anyway, we’re on for tomorrow, yes?”

“We’re on for ever. Just stay where you are, and I’ll come and make it better.”

She arrived at his house just before dawn, as if to advertise her eagerness to help, but when he opened the door she didn’t come in. “Come on. I’m going to take you away from this.”

“It’s six o’clock, Camel. I haven’t even got up yet.”

“That’s why I want to get you now. While you’re fresh. You need a break from all your books.”

Letting her minister to him, he’d begun to see, was the best way to take her out of her troubles; like acupuncture of a kind, healing the soreness in some part of her by releasing the brightness and compassion in another part. He put on his clothes and got into the passenger seat of the truck, she flinging books, brown bags full of sandwiches and little bowls of pasta into the back to make room for him. Then they drove up into the hills, on the old mountain road they’d never been along before.

It was still early, the sun hardly up, and the roads were almost empty. Here and there an older man in a bright tracksuit walking fast around the curves, a dog running up ahead. A pair of cyclists, shocking in bright yellow and purple suits, whooshing round the turns from the mountains above. In the fast-food stand where she’d stopped to pick up coffee, two gulls were perched above the speakers, and you could smell the sea, feel the presence of kelp and seaweed, with the day yet unborn.

As they drove higher around the turns, towards the Pass, they saw more and more bulldozers, sleeping on half-deserted slopes, or resting in some valley, in a circle of brown earth. Contractors’ signs sat in front of every other driveway, next to the blue warnings that told of some security firm’s surveillance. He’d never been in a place where watchfulness and hopefulness were in such alliance—the construction of new lives everywhere, and hidden cameras, unseen watchers on all sides to make sure they didn’t slip back into the soil. Churches, companies, new institutions coming up everywhere, and every few years a fire or flood or earthquake to send them all back into the earth. Life could make no impression on this soil.

As they proceeded up towards the very top of the hill—a red light winking from a satellite far above, she peering over the huge wheel like the captain of a very uncertain ship—suddenly they hit a bank of fog again, the cloud level, and when they turned a corner, coming into blue skies once more, she pulled abruptly up a steep driveway, and they found themselves on a crest.

“What are you doing? What’s up?”

“I want to look. I’ve never been up here before.” The truck was alone, at the edge of a steep slope, amidst fog and winter chill and silence. She got out, and the slamming door resounded in the emptiness. He followed, and they found themselves, in the mist, on the flat ridge, in front of the outlines of a house. There were no curtains on the windows and plate-glass doors, and they could see that there were no real divisions in the house yet: just planks everywhere and cellophane, chalkmarks, measurements scrawled in black, the outlines of a life.

“Let’s check it out,” she said, walking towards the ghostly place, marked out the way policemen in the movies draw silhouettes of bodies when there’s been a murder. “No one’s here yet.”

“They will be soon, I think.”

But she was away from him now, walking around the house, peeping through windows, tapping on the walls, as if she were a county inspector, stopping now and then to yank at a door clearly locked from the inside. He went the other way, inspecting this strange place, alone on a hilltop, of expectations, and few memories.

Then, suddenly, through the chilly, misty early light, “John. Over here. Come quickly.”

He went over to where he could hear her voice coming from, on the far side, down a rocky slope, at what must be the lower level, and when he got to where she’d been, she was nowhere in sight.

“Come on. In here.” The girl in her, whatever was hopeful, stealing into a place—apparently one door had remained unlocked—and making it, for a small while, her own.

Her steps were crackly on the cellophane, and the wooden boards were cold underneath his feet. The rooms were still dark in the absence of natural light, and as they walked they had to move carefully, not to smudge the figures and marks chalked up on the floor here and there. The corridor that linked the rooms was close to pitch-black.

“What do you think?” Her face was radiant. “Our very own house.”

“Until they come back. A few minutes from now. I imagine they start working at seven or eight.”

“Just five seconds more,” she said, not pleading but walking away from him again, so he couldn’t pull back, and tiptoeing up a small flight of stairs to a space so huge that it would surely one day be the living room. Large windows on three sides admitted them to a world of fog, and against one wall were the outlines of a fireplace.

“A whole house from scratch,” she said in wonder, “according to their dreams.”

“I don’t think their dreams included us. We should come back sometime when we know they won’t be coming.”

He turned and walked down the stairs again—a hint—but she went on, marking the territory as an animal might.

“I’ll only leave if we can come back tonight,” she said, catching up with him at last where he stood in the mist outside the door left unlocked.

“Of course we can.”

Back in the house, he went to his desk (the way a ship might go back to port), and she, stretching her arms and closing her eyes, said, “Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all.”

He posted himself at his desk, and she curled up in the armchair a few feet away. He looked at the book on Hafez, but all he could see was someone drawing a brush through her hair, again and again and again.

“Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Am I disturbing you?” Over and over, almost absently, long fluid strokes that caught the light.

“No. It’s fine.” He threw himself back into the books, almost physically, but it was useless: always, at the edge of his vision, someone pulling out a strand of hair and looking at it cross-eyed, or combing and combing, to let all the tangles out.

“What are you working on?”

“The usual. Why Sufis believe in the dark—as the place they can see the light.”

“Like us. In the car.”

“I don’t think so.” Sefadhi’s harangue had been hard to forget.

“What do you think they’d say if they could see us now?”

“They’d be appalled. We’re about as far from them as anyone could be.”

“They believed in ritual and order,” she said, and he thought of how the two of them had arrived at the same door this morning, but coming from different sides.

“They believed in everything this place negates.”

She stopped what she was doing. “You don’t think you’ll ever find anything that no one’s ever seen before?”

“I’ll be lucky to find a single sentence no one has ever written before.”

An hour or so after dark, they drove up again into the hills, in his car this time, which took the curves more easily, she, in her customary way, making it a ceremony, a secret rite, by bringing a bag in which she’d packed provisions. The fog had lifted long ago, and when they pulled up the sharp driveway to the ridge, they were looking down on lights now, hovering, the winking red blinkings of small planes, coming down to land at the airport by the sea, the presence of islands out beyond.

The streets of the small downtown were long yellow lines, only a few cars buzzing along them, and for a moment he felt he was in Granada again, in one of the Alhambra’s dark rooms, sealed off somehow from the lights of the town, and so in a position to appreciate them more.

When they were inside, though—the door gave again, easily (a measure, perhaps, by which the construction workers ensured they’d never get locked out)—it was pitch-black. She’d brought a blanket, a small flashlight to guide them through the darkened rooms, but the reach of it was small, and the house, the wind gusting around, seemed very large. As they walked, they bumped against pieces of wood, bruised shins against objects that hadn’t been there in the morning, so it seemed.

“This can be our special place,” she said, after leading him up into the large space among the open windows. “We can come here whenever we want to. Our very own abandoned house.”

“It’s not abandoned. It’s getting more occupied every day. And we can’t come anytime we want.”

“After hours, then. When it’s dark.”

For her, he thought, an empty space; for him, a place coming up and taking shape every day. In their different perceptions, all the distance that lay between them.

Through the windows now, surrounding them, there were lights. A shiver of yellow from the sleeping town below; stars intermittent in the skies; the bright-red lights of cars behind, pushing through the mountains.

“I’ve brought candles,” she said. “A bottle of wine. We can be anyone we want here.”

“Within reason,” he said, and then realized how wrong that sounded. She was trying to pull them away from boundaries.

“It’s like undressing in reverse,” she said, as she pulled out a box of matches and lit a candle.

Her face was eerie in the small light, hollowed out, ancestral (the word seemed constantly to be coming to him now). She was previous, in some way: previous, perhaps, even to all she’d suffered in her life. The light caught ridges, different angles in her face; her eyes were bright, her hair was loose against the dress she’d brought.