Black Light (2 page)
Authors: Galway Kinnell
J
amshid was one of the most pious men in the region, and he knew it. Yet, judging by the disrespectful way people treated him, one might suppose he was an infidel. He did feel a little ashamed that he had never made a pilgrimage to Mecca or for that matter to the Shrine of Fatima at Qum. But travel was expensive, and poverty was the price he paid for being honest. Other men cheated and grew rich, and then went on pilgrimages that consisted of sightseeing, good meals, and temporary marriages. When these travelers came home, they were called âHaji', wore the green sash around their swollen bellies, and had only contempt for skinny and honest men like himself. Human sinâparticularly among religious menâfilled Jamshid with revulsion. Sometimes at prayer the feeling of revulsion grew so strong he could not concentrate on God at all. It was as if his virtue, his very devotion to God, were succeeding where vice had failed, in making an atheist out of him.
A man and woman were walking ahead of him. He thought he recognized them as the two persons he had overheard haggling in the mosque. The woman was cloaked in a chaddor and the man was wearing a darvish skullcap.
Jamshid walked faster. Was their sudden appearance some sort of sign? Had God picked him, Jamshid, to follow and be their witness? As he came up behind them he could feel his heart beating with excitement. But the man turned his head and Jamshid saw he was not the Kurd at all, but only a local darvish who repaired shoes in the bazaar.
“Salaam alaikum, Jamshid,” the darvish said. “Not at your devotions tonight?” Jamshid noted the sarcasm in the man's tone.
“Salaam alaikum,” he answered. “Will you kindly mind your own affairs?” He had intended to take the long way home and arrive at the usual hour, so that his daughter Leyla would not know he had skipped the sundown prayer. It could only do harm to a young girl to see her father give up ancient practices, no matter how justifiably. But to escape this busybody Jamshid had to turn down the first street he saw, which was a street that led directly home.
He heard a droshky behind him. It was moving only a little faster than he was, and it took a long time for it to overtake him. As it did, he turned his head. An old man sat in the high seat beating the old horse. A horse which apparently had discovered that to walk fast or to walk slow did not much affect the beating it got. The droshky seemed to be empty. At last it pulled ahead, shakily bearing away its little scene of harshness and indifference. It stirred some compassion within Jamshidâa compassion, he understood, for himself.
By the time he reached his house he was beginning to regret that he had not said his prayers. When you snap a single thread, he reflected, you threaten the whole fabric. He wondered if he shouldn't pray in his own garden. Or perhaps right here in the street. Or perhaps not at all, for a prayer said alone, he recalled, is twenty-seven degrees
inferior to a prayer said in congregation. As he hesitated, the gate swung open. There stood Leyla and, close beside her, Akhbar the mason who had come that morning to repair the oven.
“Salaam alaikum,” the mason said.
“Salaam alaikum, papa,” Leyla said.
“Your oven is finished,” said the mason. “I am just leaving.”
“I can see,” Jamshid answered. He entered the garden and walked over to the little brick oven that stood in one corner. Akhbar followed.
“It is better than when it was new,” he said.
“You didn't waste your cement, I'll say that,” said Jamshid, though in the dusk he could hardly see anything at all.
“Didn't waste my cement?” Akhbar replied. “What do you mean? I wasted a full kilo. Look, I put some around in back where the bricks were coming loose. Catch any other mason putting cement back there where nobody is ever likely to look. I even borrowed an extra handful from my father, which I wasn't planning to charge you for unless he notices it's gone.”
“If you have wasted, as you say, a full kilo of cement, you have been eating it. How is it, by the way, that it took you a whole day to repair a tiny oven? I should be cursed by my ancestors for hiring the slowest mason in Meshed.” Jamshid was talking almost automatically. He stopped short, as he remembered the haggling in the mosque.
“I have worked from morning to just now on this difficult oven,” Akhbar was saying. “You see how queerly the thing is built, not a first-rate oven at all. But I have made it as good as new, if not considerably better . . .” Jamshid had stopped listening.
“Come to my shop tomorrow, we will settle matters then.”
When Akhbar had left, Jamshid knelt by the pool. Though the water in it was cleaner, certainly, than that of the mosque pool, it felt unpleasant to wash for prayer in it. For that purpose one needs mosque water. Then, spreading his carpet in the direction of Mecca, he offered his evening prayers.
Dinner passed in silence. When Leyla was not serving him, she was standing off to one side. It seemed to Jamshid the rice was a bit too hard tonight and the curd-water just slightly too thin. He would tell her about it in the morning, when they did their accounts. After dinner had been cleared, Leyla brought him his waterpipe, on which she had already set the burning coals. He liked sitting on his carpet in the garden, drawing up the drenched smoke. It was nice, too, to hear the regular bubbling of the pipe, and to see the high, angular walls of the garden around the starry sky.
Jamshid shivered a little. The night air was cool. He felt like talking to his daughter. She would be eating in the kitchen. Should he mention the rice now, while she could see what he meant? He knew he had to prepare her to be a wife, and he congratulated himself that he was succeeding. She could cook well. She was quiet and obedient. She was in good health. She was pretty. With those virtues it was strange that, although she was sixteen, she had received not only no offers from suitors, but no inquiries either. Jamshid had brought up the matter with Mullah Torbati, who knew about such matters. He had heard of several advantageous marriages this mullah had arranged for girls with far fewer claims than Leyla. His discovery tonight that Torbati also specialized in temporary marriages had come as a shock to Jamshid. He would drop the mullah and find a husband for his daughter himself. Even if he had to go so far as to
marry her to the son of Fereydoon the beet seller! He puffed angrily at his pipe. Leyla looked from the door.
“Papa, you sound like a lion.”
“Leyla,” Jamshid said, “did Akhbar really work hard all day, as he told me, or was he lolling around in the shade a good part of the time?” Leyla looked at him, he thought, a little oddly. Was there some trace of defiance, even contempt in her gaze? She dropped her eyes.
“Yes, father.” Her voice was meek. “I did not watch him especially, but when unavoidably I happened into the garden I could not help noticing that he was always hard at work.” She is a good girl, thought Jamshid, she loves and respects her father and does credit to the memory of her mother. It should not be hard to find her a suitable husband.
“Good,” he said, and unrolled the bed clothes she had brought out for him. As he lay trying to sleep it struck him that Leyla had not inquired why he had said tonight's prayer at home. It irked him that, as far as he could tell, she hadn't even noticed. He looked up at the stars and cursed the neighbors, as he did every night, for growing that tree which, showing above the top of the wall, impinged on his rectangle of heaven.
T
he next morning Jamshid knotted in the colors on the bird's neck and breast. He felt upset. He had slept only fitfully the night before, and he had had nightmares of this bird. In one nightmare the bird had changed into a vulture and had begun devouring the corpse of Leyla. In another it had swooped down on him extending its red beak, which changed into the mullah's henna-stained right hand, which then struck him. In another, its eyes contained hints of defiance and contempt, as they lowered in attitudes of perfect modesty.
Now, lighted by the trapezium of sunlight, it was the same bird as yesterday, once again belonging to paradise. But still from time to time he paused and stared at it and felt a strange dread, as if he were observing a snowflake just fallen on his warm palm. He knotted the knots very tightly, so that the bird would never fly again.
“Bird of Paradise . . .” he muttered, “Bird of Paradise . . .” He did not know why he said this. The bird did not hear.
By late morning Jamshid had finished weaving in the bird's neck and breast. He had knotted in all the colors and had clipped the wool ends smooth. His sense of discomfort
had gone. The sun patch touched the center of the floor and was on the verge of becoming a perfect square. Jamshid dressed. At any minute the moazzin would begin calling the faithful to the noon prayer.
Mullah Torbati walked in the door.
“Salaam alaikum, Jamshid,” the mullah said. Jamshid's eyes went at once to the mullah's henna-stained fingernails. The hand seemed to blur, as if a red beak were about to take shape. He looked back to the mullah's face.
“Salaam alaikum, Mullah Torbati,” Jamshid said. A wave of revulsion surged up in him, but he resolved to hold his peace until he was more in control of himself.
“I have come to speak with you,” the mullah said, “of your daughter.” His voice was high-pitched and rasping, and he spoke with grave, insinuating authority.
“Ah, my daughter . . .” Jamshid mumbled.
“You asked me to occupy myself over your daughter, dosh Jamshid.” The mullah called him by the slang for brother used between underworld fraternals. “I, who give myself in the service of God, am asked by a lowly repairer of rugs to find a match for his daughter. Mind you, I accept to do this. But to be truthful I have to tell you it is a difficult case . . . a
very
difficult case . . .” He paused to let his words seep in. Jamshid began to tremble.
“
Very
difficult . . .” the man of God continued. “A case my conscience had, yes, a scruple or two about accepting, a case only my devotion to good works and my friendly feelings toward you, brother Jamshid, finally persuaded me to undertake . . .” Now a placating tone came into the rasp. “A little extra contribution from you to the crippled and the poor . . .” he gestured deprecatingly, “could make all the difference . . . I might then, God willing, locate a candidate, pious, hardworking . . .”
“
Very?
. . .” said Jamshid.
The mullah's face lit up in a hideous smile. “Eh, brother Jamshid, so you know all about it?” The mullah stepped forward and his smile grew worse. Jamshid stepped back against the table. The sunpatch was absolutely perfect now. On the other side of it the black-robed, pale-headed figure shimmered like a bird. The voice rasped on. Jamshid could hardly make out what it was saying. “Of course you do. Who doesn't? I myself have tried, naturally, to ignore the ugly stories. Young men, after all, boast and invent, I know that. Nevertheless, nothing makes it harder to marry off a girl than a bit of gossip, even if not one word be true . . .” The mullah's expression now changed. His voice grew suddenly solicitous. “Ah, dosh, I see I have upset you.” He stepped forward again, his arm extended. The red-beaked hand lit up as it entered the falling sunlight. “Oh, mind you, the case isn't hopeless, not at all,” Torbati continued, with soothing unction in his tone. “You have me as your friend. I shall not allow them to slander the girl. Why just last night, in the coffee house, I shut up an ignorant dog of a mason . . .”
The hand opened suddenly as if it had caught fire. Jamshid took up the shears, stepped forward, and drove them with all his force into the mullah's breast. The mullah staggered, then fell backwards. He fell on his back in the sunpatch, which at once stretched grotesquely out of shape. The shears had gone in up to the hilt, and the handles protruded like a bow-knot tied on the breast bone.
Jamshid squatted down and looked at the body. He still saw the mullah alive. He saw his head turned to one side, nodding a little, as it did whenever the holy man mouthed sage advice. He could not help seeing the mullah as a little boy lying by the side of a pool. A nightingale was perched on the boy's breast, singing of the life in paradise. The pool
of the man's blood touched Jamshid's foot, and he got up with a start. The sunlight had been inching forward and had already started to leave the corpse. He tried to think what he must do. It was clear, he must turn himself in. He felt glad that, unlike the mosque, the police station could be reached without going through the bazaar. In case they wanted to reconstruct the crime, he would, of course, leave everything exactly as it was. He stepped across the corpse, stumbling a little on it, as he went for the door.
At the door he stopped. Supposing they did not believe him and turned him away with scoffing laughter? He would have to make everything plain. Returning to the body, he took hold of the shears. By opening and shutting them slightly, making little silent snips down in the dead heart, he was able to loosen them. He went out with the shears in his hand. At the turning of the stairs someone was climbing. He saw the face of Akhbar the mason.
“Salaam alaikum,” said Akhbar. “I have come to present my bill.” Jamshid held out the shears, so as to indicate he could not discuss the bill at this moment. Having just come in from the sunlight, Akhbar did not see well and reaching to shake hands, he touched the shears.
“What the devil . . .?” he whispered.
“Now that bill . . .” said Jamshid, momentarily confused. “Oh, yes, for the little oven? A graceful little thing . . . meek . . . a good cook . . .” Akhbar had vanished down the stairs.
A moment later Jamshid went back into the shop. This time he fetched the black umbrella from the corner and dropped the shears into it. He saw that the pitch of sunlight had slipped almost entirely off the body and was taking on its old geometrical form again. There was something pleasing about that. The body was turning drab.
Out in the street Jamshid could hear the loudspeaker in some minaret singing the call to prayer. It seemed a piece of good luck that he had to go to the police station, and so did not have to go to these prayers, which now seemed completely pointless. He registered the extra weight of his umbrella. Mullah Torbati, for one, he reflected, would not be at noon prayer either.
