Abandon (33 page)

“I’m sorry,” said the man, as if he’d never seen him before. “Perhaps my cousin will have time.” He gestured towards another man, standing a little behind the two professors, young, with an even thicker beard.

This second man, whose fleshy face gave the appearance of friendliness and accessibility, said, “Yes. Shall we go now?”

He went back to where she was sitting, and the three of them followed the professors out into the winter sun. “Your cousin is quite a speaker,” he said, sounding stupid even to himself; the lecture had made all words sound stupid. Around them kids in tie-dye T-shirts, on skateboards, mountain bikes, with surfboards in their hands. Asian students gathered under trees in earnest conversation, teenagers more undisguised than most, holding hands or leaning into one another, giggling.

“You grew up in Iran together?”

“No,” said the man, in a way that did not encourage further questioning. He looked away from him, and the questioner thought: a brother, truly a cousin? A beloved?

“But you’ve known one another a long time?”

“Long enough.” With a slight smile. In Westwood the men had veiled themselves behind courtesies; here they seemed to be hiding out in public.

“Coffee, over there,” said the man, pointing to a cappuccino stand that sat beside the steps leading out from the library, and the three of them shuffled, in no set pattern, to the fresh-faced boy and got their drinks. She’d seemed uneasy throughout the afternoon, and their new guest gave no impression of being any happier.

“So,” said the visitor, as they found a low brick wall on which to sit while they sipped their drinks, “you study our tradition?”

“As much as I can. It’s not easy.”

The man nodded, sipping at his coffee very fast, as if to get away as soon as possible.

“The tradition doesn’t always like to be studied.”

“It studies you,” the man said, in the cryptic, portentous way that could seem enlightening if you had patience for the Persian way, infuriating if you didn’t. “That is its message.”

“You don’t go to Iran now?”

The man shook his head, cappuccino foam around his beard.

“It’s terrible over there, I’ve heard,” she said, and they both looked up. During the lecture he’d watched her playing with her hair, and drawing in her notebook—fairy towers and crescent moons and princesses in elaborate dresses out of Napoleonic balls, with hair falling down to the waist. But now, suddenly, she was engaged.

“It’s inhuman, what they do. There should be a law against them.” The man looked up, though not at her, and it was as if something had come unlocked in him, too.

“There should be more than a law,” he said. “Whatever you have heard is only a fiftieth of the truth. It is worse than you can imagine.” His eyes had a faint light in them, slow fire, and, as so often in California, a casual conversation between immigrants congratulating themselves on having found themselves here touched on the politics of a faraway country, and suddenly a door swung open to reveal a house on fire.

“And the way they treat women,” she went on.

“The way they treat everyone,” said the young man with the affable face. “Like pigs. Against everything in our holy book. Against everything the Prophet, peace be on his spirit, told us. Against all the words spoken by our teachers, about the reverence, the deference for women. All things.” He was alive now, and speaking as if in the streets of Isfahan.

“But we hear in the papers about a loosening up—”

“You ‘hear in the papers,’ ” he said with contempt. “Of course you hear in the papers this. Our leaders, our government, they are not—forgive me—innocents. They are not young men. They know everything you want to hear. They will talk of Hegel and Kant and moderation. Of ‘détente’ and ‘new relations with the West.’ On CNN. What else can they say? What have they got to lose?”

“But that’s better than before, surely, when it seemed we were headed for open warfare.”

“Better to pretend friendship than to have a war?” The man looked at him as if he were very young indeed. “I’m sorry. Maybe in your country this is a good thing, you can smile and shake hands and pretend all is happy. In my country, no. These politicians are very clever men; ours is not a young civilization. They speak English, they make jokes about religion. They talk about ‘hardliners’ and they say they are doing something different. You see their new suits from Paris and you think they are your friends.”

The whispers, the fears, the suppositions of home ten times more urgent and desperate when they’re abroad.

“In the last year, two years, eight—no, I can say nine—of my friends have been killed. Taken into a field and shot. My own mother and father, in Tabriz, they cannot walk out of their home. They live like dead people already.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Of course you are sorry. You in the West are always sorry, very sorry for the sadness you have caused. You are excited because the ‘moderates,’ as you call them, come on the CNN and say all the things the West wants to hear. They are devils who know how to act as angels.”

The cappuccino was finished now; the man burned with all he hated.

“And the people live no better than before?”

“The ‘people,’ ” he said, spitting it out as if it were something that tasted foul. “The ‘people’ think only about one thing, and that is tomorrow. ‘How will we get food? What will happen to our children? How will we live tomorrow, and the next day?’ They will love the government only if the government stays out of their lives. If there is no war against Iraq, no war against Washington, no modernization campaign and new temple at Persepolis, they are happier than before. Like animals.”

“And Soroush? We hear he’s making a new kind of Islam, compatible with the West, trying to bring Islam into a better”—he searched for the right word—“understanding with the modern world.”

“You think they would let him speak if they didn’t control him? You think they would allow him to make this ‘better understanding’ if he were speaking against them?”

There was nothing left to say. She had fallen quiet, but she looked more sorrowful than he had ever seen her in public before; the man had finished his drink, and whatever they’d hoped to get from him, they’d gotten.

“Well, thank you for your time. It means a lot to us.”

“Thank you,” the man said, throwing the cup away. “For your listening, thank you.”

They took their leave of him, and walked towards the car. As they did, suddenly he was at their side again, importunate.

“Excuse me? You have heard about the
mujahedin,
perhaps? They are in the airport, they tell you how terrible is our government, how they want to make things better? Like before. If they come to power, every one of us will be dead. Even our grandparents, our grandparents’ nurses. Everyone who is not a young man, they will kill.”

She was fighting back tears now, he could tell, and the man, seeing this, pulled himself back. “I am sorry to tell you these things. But is better you should know.”

“Thank you for your trust.”

And then he was away again, in the sun, and they were alone in the bright plaza, with students all around, talking about the next night’s party.

When they got back home, there was another topic they could no longer speak about, and they walked around each other as if there had been a death in the family. “I’m sure it can’t be as bad as he said,” she said, sounding a little disappointed, as she always did, when all her fears were confirmed.

“I’m sure it could,” he said, unable to conceal his unsettledness. “It makes you grateful to live where we do.”

“That’s why they come here, too, I bet,” she said, with a nurse’s tenderness; if he suffered, she did.

“At least it’s better than it was. When they had brigades on hand to block out pictures of Margaret Thatcher if she appeared on the cover of
The Economist
without a head scarf.”

“It’s much better than it was,” she said, and he had the feeling, suddenly, that it was she now who was giving reassurances, because she knew much more than he.

At his desk, Bach playing on the system to give him spirit, he felt himself more than ever going backwards, to someone alone in a darkened room, making patterns, doodling as if he were she during the lecture, drawing mazes, towers, boxes that soon became as tangled as a kitten’s ball of string. He’d been planning to write on Hafez now, but it all seemed more and more irrelevant. “She’s crying out for something,” Alex had said (about the “European girl,” he tried to remember now?). “But it’s nothing any mortal soul can give her.”

He got out a piece of paper to write on the theology of the Sufis, and then found himself making word games, seeing how he could find “fade” and “dies” hidden in “Esfandi.”

“What’s going on in there?” he heard her calling from the next room. “You sound suspiciously quiet.”

“Not much.”

“Are you busy making mischief ?”

“I wish I were.”

“Can you stand a visitor?”

“I think so, yes.”

He heard her get up, and then she was standing at his door, her hair tangled from where she’d been lying on it, and her face sleepy and open, as if she hadn’t yet come up through all the levels of herself to the surface. Her feet were bare; her hands clutched the glass of lemonade he’d left for her as if too small to hurt a soul. “What is it? You look distraught.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just stand there. Like that. Nothing more.”

Early spring is radiant in California, and in the first few weeks, before the sharp light of winter is bruised and made fuzzy, the skies, blazing blue, look down on Persian carpets: the hills an arabesque of golden poppies and purple lupines, with blue-blossomed white lilac around the edges. “I tell myself sometimes that California is the place where Man plays God and locks himself out of Eden,” he wrote to Nigel, thinking of the Nasruddin story from his seminar. “It’s as if all you can see here sometimes is people walking around, looking at the ground, searching for something as if they’d just lost a contact lens, and saying, ‘It’s got to be here somewhere. I had it just a minute ago. Where can it be?’ And then the spring comes along and suddenly they find the key to the heaven they’ve locked themselves out of—except, being mortal, they let it slip again, and then they have to start searching all over again.”

They drove up into the hills and saw houses on every side coming up with new alacrity: the builders had decided that the year’s final storm had passed through, and now they could complete their constructions with impunity (until fire came, or mudslide, earthquake or flood). As they drove along the old road towards the Chumash caves, suddenly a black BMW with its top down veered out of a driveway— the driveway that led to “their house,” he realized—and a woman with affluent skin the leathery brown of an expensive handbag cursed at them as she swerved and drove towards the town.

“It makes me want to go to church and pray sometimes,” he said.

“What does? All these houses being built on such treacherous ground?”

“All of it. California makes me want to say a prayer for the undefended.”

She flinched away from him—she’d caught the hint—and then held on to his right hand as he drove up.

“Why did you come here, then?”

“Because it’s beautiful and free. It allows you to be something else. I only meant that, when you listen to someone like our friend from Iran, you remember how the rest of the world is living. Here it’s almost as if everything—even the hills and the rocks and the weather—is set up for us.”

She drew away her hand, and he could tell he’d gone too far. Someone from the outside world comes to California and finds it intoxicating; and then, the morning after, wonders what he saw in it.

“It’s something I’ve always wondered about you,” she said, a few turns later, and he could tell from her voice, all careful innocence, that she was hurt and wanted to push him away.

“What’s that? Why I don’t go somewhere more real?”

“No. What you do for church. What religion you practice. You’re always talking about it, and I know you’re a professional student of religion”—like everyone, she couldn’t help putting heavy quotation marks around the phrase—“but I’ve never seen you do anything that’s religious.”

“If it’s religious, it’s probably private. You wouldn’t see it.”

“You’re avoiding the question. Do you do it? Do you believe?”

“Of course I do. I believe the universe makes sense; that everything that happens, happens for a reason, even if it’s one that we can’t see. That everything—everyone—has the potential for some good. I trust things.”

“And I don’t.”

“That’s the difference between us,” he said, though the real difference was more profound and more desolate. She thought the angels he encouraged in her were temporary; he hoped—he had to hope— the devils were. Though they never talked about it, and in part because they never talked about it, they’d somehow put what was most essential to them, the very premises on which they’d built their lives, at stake here, and for either of them to admit defeat would be as much as to dismantle the whole structure of a lifetime. The little differences they talked about were ways of not acknowledging what was central.

They had reached the top of the old road now, and when it continued they were on the same road they’d come along their first time up here, in the mist. But more treacherous now, because they were driving into a past—and a comparison with the present—and every turn brought not new vistas but old ones, and questions about what had changed.