Mysteries of Motion (51 page)

“Only the lash, Madame. But twice.”

“So that is why Manoucher. Why you refuse him.”

“Oh no, Madame. I don’t refuse him altogether. Not from the back.” Swiftly the daughter-in-law turns her back to them all, kneels forward, and flips up her loose blouse. The lash marks, crossed vertically and horizontally, are perfectly healed.

“Madame! Watch out!” Fateh tries to pry Madame’s nails from her own pearl string.

“Jalel.
Moron. Let me be.” Madame’s hands tug at the heavy rope. She drops to her knees in a shower of beads. Beside her the two exposed girlish backs form a ruined folio, opened at the worst page.

Next to Wert, a nickering begins, a flute choking higher and higher. Fereydoun is tittering. He grasps his throat, squeezing the hysteria he can’t stop. Mir-li-li-iiiiii-ton—ton. Gagging, he stops in front of Wert, the tears sprouting from his begging face. Before Wert can move, the servant does it, one long worn hand from behind the
chador,
crack, crack, on each smooth-powdered cheek. Fereydoun drops in a crouch, head down, arms hanging, heavy convulsive intakes…whooped breath…chip chip a-chip…and at last silence. “Madame usually does it for him,” the servingwoman whispers. Above the veil her brows are grizzled, the lids papery. The blunt bazaar accent cackles. “He can’t stand the sight of a chicken being cut into even; it’s natural.”

Madame kneels in her purple sweater behind the exposed wounds of the two girls, all three bowed as toward a prie-dieu. The other Soraya sits up, turning between the other two clasping women, her eyes still closed. The breasts that face Wert are unscarred, rose-swollen, milky-white. Fateh, swooping down upon her with a harem screech, covers the girl with a scarf. But unmistakably, he’s been allowed a glimpse of her. The old servant, her veil between her teeth, is oblivious, picking up the pearls.

Fereydoun takes him by the arm. The aisle of women at the door, parting for him, gives off sparkles of gold tissue, black glitter, red-tinted black hair. Throwing off Fereydoun’s arm, he retrieves the letter, which he stuffs in a side pocket—and the small box, which he cradles in both hands. They know it contains Jenny; he’s sure of it. Blinking their mica eyelids they stand like sad eagles either side of a pyramid whose old marriage door he’s expected to reenter. Making an apologetic cringe with his box, he passes them.

The bathroom Ferey leads him to is the women’s. Two sunken tubs are separated by a broad ledge massed with tall vats of powder and bath salts, loofahs and towels, articles for the hair, all a replica of what one heard their finer bathhouses at home used to be. Fereydoun, at the toilet, is modestly slow at opening his pants. Wert turns his back. The note from Bakhtiary is a one-liner, not from his custom-made multilingual typewriter, but in hand. “Last letter. One sentiment. It’s time.” Scrawled beneath is an ankh.

Time for both of them. But he can’t open the box, shrinking even from shaking it, to hear whether the old plaster-of-Paris has broken. The face inside already clings to his fingertips. Wish I felt nothing. Wish I felt something. Which is true?

“Shall I take care of that for you?” Ferey, washing his hands with a great yellow ball of heady-scented soap, regards him equivocally.

To guard it? Or to destroy? Smart equerry, he’s not saying. Casually, Ferey seizes an atomizer and sprays his jowl. He’s at home here. Leave it to him.

What better than to leave the past, seamless or smashed, to an old eunuch who knows what his trade is: certain peculiar services.

Wert passes him the box, and is freed to urinate, to use the soap—to share any of their domestic arrangements here, including a wife. And without compromise—which must always have been the value of eunuchs. A diplomat can’t compete. He nods. “Probably you have closets galore.”

Along the way back to the main apartment, the notes archways, tilings and cushionings subtly Middle East. Even the windows have been heightened and made mosquelike. But where they aren’t draped the view is of dismally gimcrack low roofs, or that palely transitional modern brick which can’t seem to make a firm imprint on space.

“But why are we here, you’re asking—” Fereydoun says, “in this neighborhood? Everybody asks.”

“Quite.”

“Bakhtiary didn’t want us to shine out. Now—it doesn’t matter.”

“Because he’s dying?”

“Because we’re all in this country now. Or—whoever can be.”

“Bakhtiary would never come. I invited him.”

“No. He would never come.”

“Even to Manoucher?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that about dying, the old man is so pale.

“Will you excuse me, Beel. Only a moment.” On their left there’s a small room, door open, with a window on another vista—east. Ferey leaves the door ajar. There in the middle of the room, he’s salaaming. No doubt about it; he’s praying. Their movements make them supple beyond what Western devotions generally do for one. When he emerges he’s noncommittal, but blowing his nose.

The main room’s walls are a dazzle of rugs, making it one of their Arabian-nights enclosures. Now its deep burnishment sickens him. These rugs know too well the mahogany that blood turns to. Under their woolen astronomy of charming animal alembic and arboretums flattened for foot or eye, too often that spongy wound-color. Yet the inhabitants of this always migrant oasis can still thrall him. Crammed now on folding chairs, they’re no longer his or a newspaper’s invention. Their bank accounts have been streaming ahead of them for years against this possible moment; they’ll be buying houses and schooling the children here, yet he can’t imagine them on the world’s chopping-board like other people; he can’t see them as ever settling in. This tent of theirs floats with them, always perfectly aligned—and landing anywhere.

Up there on one side of the room Bakh presides on screen in his gnarled garden, armed for entry into the oldest eternity, with child-bride and at his feet a dish of sand, scrawled with religion. On the opposite wall there is now a hugely ready video installation—no doubt sent the way a five-pound box of candy “from your local merchant” used to be, by a conglomerate. Merely one of the contradictions daily exploding around the world, which any dutiful newscaster would report. Yet would such a reporter see what it is more than money which joins that beaky woman over there in her pared Paris black, that tail-coated patriarch who looks about to address the whole chattering family-wedding crowd yet is never seen to speak, Madame herself, just settling her own group on a separate dais, the boy teenagers stiffly Englished up in haircuts and jackets which ask for blond heads not black, and their awkwardly frothy girl counterparts—all the way down to the bright infant dots on a shoulder or a lap?

Except for their servants there’s not a
chador
among them, or any remnant trace of the beads and saddles of the old donkey culture. Over the last seventy-five years most of these people wouldn’t have slept toeing a brazier or even in the more formal quiltings but in beds imported from the West, and their Cartier jewelry may be thieved from them at the best hotels, yet they’re joined to the old
bodgi
and her vast peasanthood by what they all share. A shallow
jube
of understanding runs through them all like that old water ditch of theirs, in the way that same dirty old life support used to frame their cities—and must still link their villages. The remarkableness of the
jube
was its shallowness, in which, stared into long enough, all their human commerce became clear. He must always have known what this people’s enclosures contained. What unnerves him is that he may always have wanted it.

Up there on the grainy screen at his left, in that garden picture of erotic duties to self and who knows what obligations to truths greater than the self, his old friend’s expression, that dignified alertness to advantage, hasn’t changed. But did we in the Department ever consider what Bakh meant by advantage?

“Where’d you prefer to sit, Mr. Beel?”

Not with the men. Their poker-faced swapping dries up at his approach; he’ll learn nothing. Where are his own letters to Bakh now? The daughter-in-law doesn’t admire them; he’d be interested to know why; he admires her. A man would always know where he stood with her.

Madame and she are now on the dais, facing the crowd, where many of the women cling separate in the old style, leaving an admixture of couples of all ages, including several striking young pairs got up like internationally gilded statuary, and those few hormonally neuter old bodies who at their age were permitted anything. He doesn’t see the girl. The aunt.

“Let’s sit at the back.”

Fereydoun hesitates. “You Americans. Such democrats.”

Near the staircase to Manoucher’s apartment is a short row of empties which must be reserved for the servants; two in
chador
are already at its farther end. He and Fereydoun seat themselves at the other.

“Who’s that tall guy—he going to speak?”

“Our former chargé d’affaires. No—he’s just—”

“Showing himself.” Always a lot of that, anywhere in government. Power emeritus, among the displaced. “I suppose—Bakh won’t speak?”

“The marriage ceremony does not require it.”

Fereydoun’s one hand, crumpling restlessly; opens to show a string of worry-beads, a fine one, small evenly worn globes of some cloudy quartz over which the thumb can move contentedly. At first sight of such beads, one might think them rosaries, but their use had been laic, subtly somewhere between the cigarette and the psychiatrist, a social admission that men must fiddle. In Iran, a colleague trying to use them to help break his cigarette habit had found them useless to someone lacking their intricate vocabulary of social reference. They were a habit always significantly of the background, and always masculine. He’d heard it was considered lower class to swing them. The cultivated could make them seem a sensuous pursuit, not a nervous one. They were old-fashioned now. Bakh had never used worry-beads. Or never in front of Westerners. But Fereydoun’s watch must not be enough for him.

“And Manoucher…will it be dangerous for him to show himself?” Never
mind,
he thinks, watching the beads slide, jerk and slide. “Don’t bother to explain, Fereydoun. There’s no logic in revolution.” Not even in history. We only lead ourselves to expect it. That is how we intellectually live—even the illiterate. Wert glanced at the two serving-maids. Maybe those most of all. Bakh, relinquishing his son only because he sensed the regime was falling, only to let the boy align himself with it—and now mending his own fences with the holy men, must have known this from the beginning. It’s all a walking-on eggs, he’d written. Between versions of that greediest of all egalitarians, Bill—the natural ape.

There’s no logic but compensation. That’s what these people know best.

The old equerry’s now looking at him in such open pain that he half wants to take him in his arms. “The bride, Mr. Beel—” he says in his high voice, “she doesn’t need to speak either.”

Wert sat. Terrible to see a man of that age pacify himself, a revolution, and God knows what all, with a canny string of amethysts. In Wert’s own heavy daytime brogues his toes spread, seeking surface, and delicately retract. “I know. They’re sent.”

Fereydoun got up. “It’s beginning.” On the second screen, blank until now, an agitation of images has begun—a house, a garden torch-lighted, major-domos and waiters, food tables al fresco, and a trickle of guests in evening dress—from the embassies? Farther behind is a somber crowd, more solidly packed, from which the camera skitters back to tables stiff as cardboard, the food still unattacked. Whether the camera is badly maneuvered or pseudo-artistic is moot.

“Wait. What is that place?”

“The hospital. In Isfahan.”

“And that?” Wert points to Bakh in his chair and the leaning girl.

“Their house in Teheran.”

“When?”

“When? Why, I suppose when the girl first came. Some time ago…But that up there. That’s the hospital all right. The garden, yes.” He leans forward judiciously. He must have been a palace man all his life. “I’ll leave you now. My place is with Madame. But, Mr. Beel—that staircase behind you leads down also. We’re very late. One of the maids can show you out.” He flicked an eye toward them. “If you must fly.”

So they’ve tried—is he admitting? Starting all the way from London, or even earlier, from those palace reserves of obligation where they store people like Wert. Where ever since Venice, he must have been kept.

If he stays, what a confidant this Fereydoun could make. Mere colleagues like Nosy pale beside him—and his clan.

“I liked the boy,” Wert said.

“Boy? Manoucher?” Is Fereydoun going to titter again? Instead, a surprisingly heavy fist comes down on Wert’s shoulder. “He was there.”

The lights dim as he leaves, a genie receding. Except for the two maids on the row, who don’t count, Wert’s left to himself for the first time. So abrupt is the plunge back into this familiar, slow-breathing, cud-in-the-mouth self of his when in crowds, that he examines it. Is this his favorite state of being? Or a cul-de-sac from which Bakhtiary, with ambush if necessary, hopes to rescue him?

Around him, conversation’s not fading. Their sense of attention is different, requiring constant formal annotation aloud. Very out loud or very hush-hush; that’s how they live, not much middle ground to them. He’s all middle ground, Bakhtiary’s told him. His country’s taught him to be. Oh there’s ashcan violence in your cities, Wert, stifled mass murder in your suburbs. And political murder, if you can call what’s random or mad “political.” Bakhtiary can’t. All Wert’s own aggression, he’s pointed out, is now in his country’s bombs, and all his once valuable personal secrecy. Your bombsights are now your people’s chief organs of meditation. What barbarians you’re teaching us to be.

There’d been a convention of Western philosophers at the Teheran-Hilton; Bakhtiary had wondered why. “Maybe to observe our code of violence, which is in our daily living, dear Bill? A head lopped off, here and there. A mild thumbscrew, to clear a man’s head so that he may perhaps keep it. Or a skin-peeling, to correct a woman’s. How civilized—to be able to suffer personally for one’s views! There our women are even more equal than yours. They guard our secrets, you know, like the Pentagon does yours. So we must guard them.”