Abandon (25 page)

One of the men—both dark, and dressed in the clothes of the poor, dirty white shirts and grey trousers—shuffled over to one of the great caskets in the room, and placed a lighted stick of incense on it. Then a rose. A few moments later, he took another stick of incense and a rose and put them on the other casket, built like an afterthought on the side, housing the man who dreamed up the palace, now beside his wife. The decorations on his tomb were flowers, on hers verses from the Quran.

Above them, just faintly coming down the steps, were the last voices of sightseers trying out the echo, amazed to have the great dome talk back to them and no one else. Their voices climbing up towards the rafters, and then reverberating around and around them in circles. But the caskets they were so busily serenading were empty ones, ruses to distract the world from the real spirits buried in this underground place.

The men said nothing, just went quietly, devotedly, about their task. He was the only other one in the company of the tombs. His feet on the marble floor—Damascus again—were cold. He felt in some way that he didn’t try to explain to himself, or even to make clear, that being here was a large part of what reading his poems, seeing her was about. Under the public exterior, there was always an unvisited deep vault.

In his hotel room, lit only by oil lamps now that the electricity had failed again, he turned over a postcard of the false tombs and wrote:

Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is
it that each man’s relentless longing becomes a
god in him?

—VIRGIL

The next day, flying towards England, he tried to imagine how he would begin to tell her of the experience: one in which nothing had happened externally, but certain locks had fallen away. One of which he had no photographs and which he could not explain by way of any postcards or posters of the Taj. One, in fact, that he had been pointed towards by the woman with whom he was in some ambiguous way “taken.”

“You go into a mosque,” he heard himself telling her in his mind, “and it’s empty space: water and shadow and light. In the desert, water’s worth more than rubies. The smallest glint of color almost blinds you. You walk into a prayer hall and it’s so vast, so empty, for all the people praying and chanting and chatting there, that you get swallowed up. You disappear: become a particle of light, a wisp of smoke.

“You’re in a place so safe, and yet so rapt, that you lose all sense of you, and become the air.”

Getting out another postcard, he simply copied out a sentence he’d found in a bookshop at the airport.

Heart is the name of the house that I restore.

—MIR DARD

I missed you more than I can say; more even than my silence could communicate.

J.

The next morning, making his excuses to Nigel and Arabella (“I still think you’ve gone bonkers. A little while in California, and you become—I don’t know—Timothy Leary or something”), he took an early train to Oxford and walked through the muddle of dusty red-brick streets, as changeless as the buildings around them, to Mowbray.

The man was getting on, of course, but he still kept up his full load of teaching, and every afternoon, or even late at night, after a Formal Dinner, he’d get on his bicycle and go along South Parks Road all the way to the flat he shared with his sister, off the Bardwell Road. “Home” was probably putting it too grandly: it was a typical North Oxford encampment, with astrologers in the basement, and the sound of Tibetan chants coming up through the gratings now and then, to mingle with the bicycles, odd language students with pasty faces slipping in and out of doors, a piano teacher whose errant students served instead of Muzak, and a few very dark men who talked about the LSE but seemed in some form affiliated with the university. In the middle of the ragged chaos, Mowbray seemed content in a small second-floor flat, offering
“ex officio”
advice to anyone who sought it.

When he walked up the steps to the porridge-grey building and rang the white button three down from the top, a small figure appeared, a few minutes later, looking worried, and Alice Mowbray showed him the way up to the room. In all his years of knowing the scholar, he’d never penetrated the secret sanctuary before.

“How are you?” said the professor, getting up from his armchair, a little unsteadily.

“Very well. You?”

“I survive. You’ve brought something for me, I see.”

“Nothing much.” It was a book he’d found in the hotel bookshop in Delhi, surely out of print here, and redolent of a time when Mowbray was himself a student. An exploration of St. Thomas’s work in southern India, by one F. W. Pickering Smith, M.A.

“Thank you, thank you: I knew his son,” his old professor said, not entirely unexpectedly. “And you, how is life in California?”

It felt absurdly like a le Carré novel, but he told him anyway. “Almost exactly as you’d expect.”

“A good thing and a bad thing, then?”

“Exactly.”

“But it agrees with you? You’re happy?” Ruthless about essays and excuses, he was always disarmingly kind—undefended, almost— when it came to human things. “He pours his strength into his scholarship and keeps his vulnerability for his life,” as Parkinson had said once.

“Enough. Sefadhi’s a brilliant tutor, and the place is beautiful to look at. It’s never lost that Gold Rush feeling, though now all the prospectors are shrewd enough to say it’s ‘spiritual gold’ they’re after. But ever since Pagels, I think, they’re all out for hidden treasure.” He wondered how much he was talking of himself.

“And you’re off doing heretics?”

“In a sense. It’s bracing.”

“I should think it would be,” the old man said, with the ambiguous air that had left generations of students unsure of whether they’d been patted on the shoulder or put in their place (or, more likely, both at once).

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, as his sister brought in a tray with the tea and milk and sugar and a stack of digestives.

“I got your letter, of course,” he went on—now that the biscuits were here, the formal session was deemed to have begun—“and would be glad to help if inexpertise is no hindrance.”

“It’s not at all. I mean, I don’t want to put you on the spot, and I know it’s not your field, but I keep running into hints, all over the place, about so-called secret manuscripts—unpublished things, verses kept in family homes and the like—that came out of Iran in ’79, or soon thereafter. I was wondering if you’d heard anything about that?”

The older man broke a biscuit in his hands, and dipped it in his tea. His pride was evident in his terror of making even the smallest mistake in a scholarly attribution, and the visitor was reminded that, for all their affected vagueness, English academics are as much double agents as any of their colleagues, knowing how to hide their intelligence behind practiced masks of ignorance.

“It isn’t my field, as you say: I’ve never been drawn to it myself. I think it would be foolish of me to say anything.”

He sat back, as if waiting to be prompted.

“Anything would be a help, really.”

“I think the only thing I can give you that might be any use would be this, which fell into my hands quite recently. I know nothing about its origins, or its author, but, whatever the reality of either, it’ll be of more help to you than I could be.” He picked up an offprint that was lying on top of the books on his table, beside the chair, and handed it over. Clearly—characteristically—he’d hunted it down and set it aside in anticipation of this meeting.

“Otherwise, I can profess only uselessness. All my students these days seem more keen on the Reverend Moon and the swami on all the television shows.” Oxford still appointed its Regius Professors of Divinity by means of official letters from the Palace and trips to 10 Downing Street, but religion was held to be such a part of life that it was not always recognized as a subject. Those who studied it, like Mowbray, had to pretend to be anthropologists.

“Well, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time,” he said, feeling that he’d given his old professor a taste of California to share with his colleagues and sister, and the old man had given him something in return. “I expect you have loads of essays on Hare Krishna to read by tomorrow. It’s very good to see you again, and I’ll profit, I’m sure, from the article.” The benediction had been given; his job now was to make himself scarce.

When he got back to the house near the river—Nigel did everything he could, through the carpets on his wall, his trips to Yemen, even his fencing lessons on Wednesdays, to show the world (and himself) he hadn’t become the person he used to mock—he took himself off to his room, and went slowly through the article his old professor had given him. He’d actually taken it out of his briefcase in the train, and then, for some obscure reason (the field must be getting to him), put it back in, lest anyone see what he was reading. Not that an offprint from an issue of the
Journal of Asiatic Studies
from two years before was likely to set many alarms ringing on the 17:23 to Paddington.

The title of the paper was “Missing in Action: Sufi Manuscripts and the Second Revolution,” and the first few pages, as was the convention, were devoted to saying how little the author knew, and how much was still unknown, and how indebted he was to fellow scholars, even while offering himself as a sovereign authority. Sufi, Bahai, and Zoroastrian scholarship had all been thrown into disarray when the Second Revolution (as the paper always referred to it) came into being; great buildings had been renamed, memories of the old regime had been purged, and history had been subjected to an instant “retrofit” (the French author clearly eager to show himself conversant not just with École Normale Supérieure English, but with all the nuances of Santa Monica).

Overnight, history and literature had been sent out of the country, like a second Holy Family: forced to hide out, affect modern clothing, even go to enemy countries until the storm subsided. Treasures had been hidden in secret compartments in suitcases; hundreds of trunks, firmly sealed, had passed through the hands of dockworkers in Bandar-e-Abbas. The scene had been as “unruly,” the article said, in its slightly precious way, “as when an earthquake shakes a house, and its inhabitants run into the cold, taking what treasures they can carry.

“The age of late capitalism,” it went on—and here he began to pay more attention—

is the age of global scattering: heirlooms, secrets, flying across the planets as when a vase is shattered. Myriad pasts find their way into every present. A Dzogchen sutra is as likely to be found in Santa Fe as in Paris; to see Khmer Buddhas, you are best advised to proceed to the fourth story of the River City Mall in Bangkok; most of the great treasures of the Song Dynasty are said to be in a home in Palo Alto. The very bricks and mortar of the civilizations that made us up are now up for offer, in real time, at
sothebys.com
.

What this means, hermeneutically, is that texts have shed their authors, as much as they’ve lost their readers. They float, without names, without addresses, like refugees with only transit papers moving from airport to airport. Words, poems, spells, are just part now of the postmodern diaspora. In our own field, we follow the Sufi path by going to places that have never heard the name “Hafez” and committed none of Maulana’s verses to memory.

Yet the history of any tradition, the way it has lived and colored minds, is to be found not in the Sheldonian, nor behind some mock-Tudor mansion in Bel Air. And the poems of the great Sufis will disappear not because they are erased from the earth, nor even because they are uprooted, and can now be uploaded in an instant. Rather, they will fade from view only if those who have eyes to see them fade. If they get translated into languages that have no word for “fire” of the Sufi kind. If they get paraded before the ignorant as once women from Egypt, or Chinese men, were paraded before the laughing crowds of Europe. If those who have keys to their secret doors disappear, the poems will shrink into love songs, or cries to drunkenness and dissipation. When the eyes that understood the Nabytean rites of Palmyra, when the priests who were aware of the hidden codes of Karnak disappeared, then, and only then, did their cultures lose their meaning and their power. Sufi manuscripts are everywhere, we know; but do we have eyes with which to read them? The meanings never change, only the people who seek for them.

It was a typical piece of evasion, clotted and muffled and oblique, with a tremulous current of outrage running just below its carefully maintained tone of academic neutrality. True to his thesis, his assumptions, the author gave away nothing about his own background or interest; it was only the name and the address in Paris that suggested a male Frenchman. In many ways, he seemed more interested in the “postmodern postmortem” he claimed to find—“where Ronald McDonald is knocking at the gates of Qom, and the people of America are hungering for Kabir”—than in what the poems contained.

But in a curious way, the paper gave him hope. It spoke on behalf of underground manuscripts, he felt, and its message, unexpectedly, was the same as hers, reiterated so often: “Don’t give up on me, please. Please don’t give up on me yet.”

When he came out from the Customs area, into the bright winter light, she was, as before, nowhere to be seen. Girls in halter tops and miniskirts, going this way, going that, girls with fair hair not their own, frightened women stepping into new lives and looking for the loved ones who ought to have been waiting for them but were not: everyone except a girl who’d seemed closest to him when he was far away.