Black Light (4 page)
Authors: Galway Kinnell
T
hey would start walking before dawn, sometimes following the white dirt road, sometimes striking across the open land. Spring floods had cut gullies and the way was difficult. Sometimes the ground was so mushy with salt they sank in it. When the sun stood directly overhead they would stop in the shade of some rock, eat bread and water, and sleep. Ali, who had the carpet to lie on, would fall asleep at once. Jamshid, who lay on the earth, usually remained awake, more and more exhausted.
The old man showed no curiosity about who Jamshid was, and Jamshid asked no questions of the old man. He was only able to piece together that Ali had left his home years ago and now lived as a nomad trader, buying a camel load of what was cheap in one city and selling it in another where it was dear. He noted the saddle-bags were crammed with yellow and blue spoons from the plastic factory in Meshed. One morning Jamshid found the old man gazing about, muttering, “Where's Omar, Where's Shireen?” and cursing softly, and patting the camel affectionately, “Ah, poor Hassan!”
Jamshid asked Ali how he had managed to see him in the darkness that first night. “I didn't see you,” Ali answered. “I heard you. From a long way off I heard you moaning to yourself. I am known as Ali of the Good Ears.”
One night, while Jamshid was lying on his back under the moon, trying to imagine an inviolable cloth under him that could protect him from the infections and insomnia-producing rays the earth gave off at night, Ali, whom he had thought asleep, addressed him quietly. “Do not move. A scorpion is walking across you. If he touches your skin you must not twitch or move a muscle.”
No sooner had Ali spoken than Jamshid felt the creature touch the bare skin of his chest. He managed somehow not to jump but to keep his body rigid. He did not budge except to urinate in his trousers. The scorpion crawled forward, then sat still again. Would it never get off him? It crawled again. His scalp tingled. He was afraid the hair of his chest might stand on end and scare the scorpion into striking. Suddenly he realized he had lost track of where it was. He felt it here, he felt it there. Now a slow, stinging sensation took place on his neck, a sensation which was local and momentary, but which rippled out in all directions, breaking up his face, his chest, as if he were only an image. His life was over. What matter? He hated his life anyway, and the earth that killed you the moment you lay down on it. But he would take his killer into the grave with him. He reached for it, but he only felt his neck, perfectly unswollen. The moon was down, he saw, and the constellations had slid a long way. About his loins his trousers were damp and cold. He felt pleased with himself. A scorpion had walked across him, and he had merely pissed and dozed off.
The next morning Ali's comment was, “Is it a disease or is it just easier than pissing elsewhere?”
The land was rolling, heaved, and mountains were always on the horizons. Sometimes the two men would see wild asses. They would get very close before the striped creatures saw them, bellowed, and went galloping off as if trying to be horses, but too top heavy. They would see gazelles in flocks that went wilting away, blown by a fast wind. Now and then Jamshid would see, perched on some outcropping of rock, a mountain goat in profile, standing up there still as a rock.
“By the way,” Jamshid said one day. “Did you
hear
that scorpion that night?” When Ali shook his head his large ears shook. “No,” he said. “By the moonlight I saw him crawling on you. The reason I knew the fellow was about was that he had just crossed over
me.”
In the oasis city of Tabas they encamped in the Shah garden, under the shade of date palms. They remained several days, trading a few spoons for necessities. One afternoon, Jamshid was lying on his back in the grass, looking at the sky. He could hear a soft clicking noise, but he did not pay attention, for he was occupied with a thought. The thought was that they had put a carpet into this garden, that had been put in this oasis, that had grown in this desert, that lay in this world. He was unsure of the next step. Perhaps he should start at the beginning and try to go in the other direction. Now he noticed the odd noise again and looked toward Ali. The old man sat on the carpet, occupied with his feet. Jamshid cried out, threw himself forward, and snatched the trimming shears from the old man's hands.
“What are you doing with these?” he hissed, shaking all over. “Tell me what are you doing?” he shouted. The shears glinted in his hands.
“Cutting my toenails,” Ali said, with only the suggestion of a smile. “But we must wash them,” he went on. “There's a little bit of old blood on them.” He reached out and took them back from Jamshid, and turned again to his toenails. He glanced up. “For it's a pity to throw away a good pair of shears.”
F
or many days they moved south across the great desert. There were no mountains, grass, trees, streams, or even rocks. There was sand. Now and then they saw the ruts trucks had made the past winter, when the desert was hard enough to be driven on. Once they came to a mile-wide swath of ruts, where the sand had been soft and each truck had been forced to go wider than the last, to avoid sinking into the ruts of the trucks before it. Huge sand dunes had come rolling over these ruts in the meantime, and it looked as if the trucks had driven straight into the sand hills and disappeared.
The camel was walking more and more slowly, and the two men had to half drag it. Their bread had become light as paper. They softened it in their mouths for longer and longer periods, as they ran out of spittle. Ali had brought dates, which was what they mainly lived on. Jamshid could still not sleep. Worn out and half-starved, he felt he would not last much longer. He helped pull the camel not by strength but by the dead weight of his body wishing to fall forward. He also began to feel resentment toward Ali, who didn't mind anything, but kept on going like a machine.
What a stupid old man, Jamshid would think, here we are, nearly dying, and he doesn't even notice it. Perhaps it was because the old man slept on the carpet that he did not tire. He began to hate him for it. One night it came to him that the only way to save himself was to murder Ali and take the carpet for himself. Then, protected from the earth by the woven ornaments of paradise, he would rest as on a pure sunlit cloud.
The next morning Jamshid realized that he must be going out of his mind to have had such thoughts. He watched as Ali made tea. The man belonged to the things around him, and like them he was inaccessible. He poked the burning charcoal with his knobby hands and did not get burned. He seemed to live far away from himself. Aside from all points of right and wrong, Jamshid reflected, it would be impossible to kill this old man.
Later Jamshid made a point of inspecting the carpet. The knotted wool was nearly all gone and the carpet had only the airiest residuum of color and design left. It had once been a prayer rug, and the outline of the sacred niche, with its willow tree, was barely visible. In the old days Jamshid would have recommended this carpet be thrown on the trash heap. He persuaded himself as best he could that it was nothing to covet.
“Look in here,” Ali said one morning. He pointed into the open mouth of the camel, who lay sleeping. “You see, he has only a few teeth left. It means he hasn't long to live. Camels use themselves up. I once knew an old man who died with all his teeth as if he expected there would be something to chew in the grave.” A little while later Ali added, “I think if I were you I wouldn't worry about sleeping on the ground. There are worse fates than getting dirty.”
The next day the green and white line of Yazd appeared on the horizon. Even Hassan the camel seemed to grow cheerful. At the Isfahan road, still some miles outside of Yazd, they found a coffee house. It looked very nice in its brilliant whitewash and its little blue Pepsi-Cola sign. Inside there were carpet-covered earthen platforms. On one of them sat two men puffing at waterpipes. Kicking off their geevays Ali and Jamshid squatted on the platform facing them.
The proprietor was happy to see the old man. “A long time since you've been by,” he said.
“Years,” Ali answered. “The trip is hard. I was glad I didn't have to make it alone. I only attempted it to see if I am too old. I think I am, for it has made me hungry as two lions. What do you have in the way of a chicken?”
“Many plump, tasty birds,” the proprietor said, and beckoned them to the door of the courtyard. In the compound a dozen or so hens and one cock were pecking unhappily at the ground. “Let's feel that especially scrawny one there,” Ali said, pointing to the fattest bird he could see, “and find out if there's any flesh on her at all.”
“You mean this plump, tender thing?” the man said, and swooped a hen up by the neck. With much squeezing and poking the two men finally settled on a price. The proprietor unclasped a small rusty penknife and haggled at the head until it had nearly come off. It still dangled by a bit of skin when the proprietor flung the bird into the yard for bleeding. She set off at a fast run with blood pumping from her neck. Unbalanced by the dangling head, she ran in crazy directions. The cock appeared to think she was experiencing an unusual sexual frenzy for he went charging after her. When at last he caught up with her and leapt upon her she fell dead.
The proprietor shook his head. “A whore to the very end,” he said sadly.
“Never mind,” said Ali. “At least she died at work.” He and Jamshid went back into the coffee house to await their meal.
“She might have been ugly,” Ali said, when they had gone back inside, “but she had a good figure. We will have a feast, for if the man doesn't know how to raise a chicken, he knows better than most how to cook one.”
Jamshid noticed that the two men sitting there were observing them.
“You've walked down from Meshed?” said one, a thickset man with watery eyes. “Then you must have left town just about the time of the murder.” Jamshid slupped tea from his saucer and stared at the ground.
“I don't know of any murder,” Ali said.
“Then you're slow walkers,” the thickset man said.
“Oh, it was quite a sensation,” the proprietor put in. “Torbati, the famous mullah, was stabbed to death by a crazed carpet-repairer. The religious authorities have put up a reward of one thousand tomans for whoever brings him in dead or alive.”
Jamshid at once felt resigned. He had never expected his escape to succeed anyway. But he resolved to give nothing away.
“Killed by a miserable rug-repairer whose daughter was a slut,” the proprietor went on. “The good mullah had just been . . .”
“A slut?” Jamshid cried, cutting the man off in mid-sentence.
“Yes, indeed,” said the proprietor, interpreting Jamshid's excited tone as a tribute to his narrative powers, “a very slut. A dog's son of a mason had laid her that very
morning, it's said. The good mullah was just advising the poor fool her father to keep close watch . . .”
“Who says it?” Jamshid said, in a loud, quavering voice.
“Why, the radio says it,” the proprietor answered, in an injured tone. “Who can you believe if you can't believe the radio, I'd like to know?” He retreated to his cooking.
The thickset man was whispering to his companion; presently the companion got up and went out. The man sat staring at Jamshid and making bubbles in his waterpipe. Ali and Jamshid ate their meal in silence.
Outside, Ali filled the waterbags and Jamshid hissed and kicked the camel to its feet. After they had moved on a way, Jamshid looked back at the coffee house. He saw the thickset man and the proprietor standing on a little rise with their shadows laid out before them.
The sun sank. The empty horizon bloomed a soft pink that quickly shrank to a thin green line. Behind them, over the place where Yazd would be, a full moon was coming up. They walked a long time without speaking, Ali leading the way across the sand. Near midnight, at a great rock, they sat down.
“Where are we going?” Jamshid asked.
“Shiraz,” Ali said.
“I am sorry about the plastic spoons.”
“Never mind. They will bring an even better price in Shiraz. In Shiraz they are crazy about plastic spoons. And I have a little house there, near the tomb of Hafez. My wife lives in it, waiting to give me a piece of her mind. She will take care of you until this thing blows over. Memories are short. Kill a policeman, and they hound you until you die. Kill a mullah and you've nothing to worry about. In his heart everybody dreams of killing himself a mullah. The reward is the nuisance. But in a little while the mullahs will see there are better uses for a thousand tomans than giving
it away. I'll leave you in Shiraz, make the trip to Burijird, and by the time I'm back your crime will be forgotten.”
It did not occur to Jamshid to protest or to express gratitude. And as he lay awake, he felt, for the first time since killing Mullah Torbati, the strange stirrings of possibility. Perhaps there was even a future. Even happiness. But why, he wondered, should this old man, who had a house and a wife, spend his days wandering around the desert, if happiness did exist?
“Why do you not stay in Shiraz?” Jamshid asked. But Ali snored comfortably. Those famous ears, Jamshid thought.
The moonlight shone in his eyes. He wondered what Ali meant by âgetting dirty'. It seemed to him, on the contrary, the whole point was to grow pure. After an hour or so he heard Ali whispering.
“They're coming, as I thought they might. They're following our tracks. They plan to kill us in our sleep.” A smile came over the old man's wrinkled face. “But we will set the trap. Quick. Take Hassan ahead and make tracks so they will go on, thinking we had only stopped here to rest. I will wait in the shadows of this rock and give them a surprise.” He hissed Hassan to his feet and handed the rope to Jamshid. “Now go,” he said.
Facing him in the moonlight, Jamshid suddenly knew this savage old man was his friend. At bottom he understood it was of no importance whether or not he himself escaped. But he saw that Ali took it for granted that he would want to save himself. He did not like seeing this man put in danger for a trivial cause. Ali thrust the rope into his hands.
“But . . .” Jamshid began. Suddenly he felt fearful. But Ali was grasping the great shears in his right hand and his teeth glinted in the moonlight.
“Go,” Ali said.
