Mysteries of Motion (52 page)

On the video screen, Bakhtiary himself is now advancing. The short, sturdy feet plant themselves steadily as the camera travels forward. Wert can’t see the backs of them. Bakh’s wearing one of the deep black suits of thinnest silk which they used to affect in the worst heat for formal occasions. Here in Queens in snow weather, some of the men are wearing them. In that blazing garden of the still photograph at the left, Bakh’s suit is white—for engagement time? The video garden on the right-hand screen is a nighttime one, but well illuminated, and as the saying goes—“live.” Though even so, a viewer may be struck with certain cliché album conclusions on the passage of time.

The announcer comes on, to a low spate of “Ahs!” from the audience; he’s a young Iranian whom many of them know from Paris. Speaking English with an Oxford accent interspersed with French, he ripples out a long list of Bakh’s credits:—
industrial magnate, adviser to the new regime.
On that pause, the camera shifts. The ayatollah is coming forward. The audience sighs. “Ah, that one.” We progress from comfort to comfort, Wert thinks. This mullah’s name isn’t yet known to Wert or his newspapers, but he is plainly an important one. His wrappings shine powerfully, properly subordinating the face, which appears to listen impassively.
This is Mr. Bakhtiary’s third marriage. Though his holdings are in the most modern industries, and he is expected to help regularize the regime’s management of these, he himself has always kept to the Islamic laws in his private life.

And perhaps he has. With such scant outward change. Ninety years, what has he done with them; what’s been done to him? Is that jaw slightly swollen, or merely thrust forward? The necktie loosened? People here are murmuring what people do; the tenderest audience can’t help scavenging. “Those dark glasses, I wish he would take them off.” Everybody wants him to look at him or her personally.

So does Wert.

The bride is from a family prominent in Ardebil.
At last, a shot of the bride, in heavy white and a headdress, surrounded by women, somewhere inside the house. Silence. Then a cry from the dais: “Yes, her father has a string of sweet-shops, very prominent.”

Fateh is made to shut up, not without laughter.

His eyes are getting used to the partial light; he can see Madame. She’s shed her sweater set at last for a gown which should glitter when she moves. It doesn’t. There’s no code for translating her feelings. He tries to imagine his mother, separated for half a lifetime from his father, presiding in public acknowledgment of his father’s remarriage. With these people, though, it’s not remarrying—while we’ll continue to say that even when a man is on his eighth wife. For them it’s been onward-marrying, as much for clan as for the man.
Gallinaceous birds, we are
—Bakh had once informed him.
Look it up, pal.
He had to. Ordinary domestic fowl. But what Westerner, if reported this, would honor it?

Minutes ago he was hungry, now hunger’s gone, down wherever other intensities send it. He can’t name what these are, except that his chest seems to be surgically widening. There’s always the staircase, if coming alive gets too much for him. Glancing along the row, he notes that the nearer
chador
is wearing dark glasses, a Western modesty. He’s never seen those with a
chador.
Another reportable fact.

In front of the television screen here, someone’s placing a tray of sand molded into hieroglyphs similar to those etched in the sand of the tray at the feet of Bakh and his girl in the still photo. Now the real Bakh—or the one moving on video, is seating himself. As the camera advances, a third tray can be seen on the screen, in front of Bakhtiary’s chair. The trinity of them—in still, on video and one actually here on the floor before them all—is eerie past ritual, suggesting a fourth dimension behind all these submissive replicas. Bakh, the real Bakh, is now looking out at them here. Behind him is the real scene. Is he noting the differences?

There can’t be many relatives up there in that sleuth-crowd pressing silently behind Bakhtiary’s chair. For one thing, so many are here. On the other hand, there’s no mullah here. No roses. Not a one; that’s strange. Queens has florists, flowers. Maybe this crowd hasn’t yet brought itself to believe in them. Though the row in front of him is rapt.

The mullah’s now addressing the camera from beside Bakhtiary’s chair, raising his right arm up down, up down. On the mullah’s face, which Wert always thinks of as a single generic one, is the stare that such faces always had there, not inward or meditative but fanatically forward, past the flock itself, toward the letter of the law. Yet always full of secular gall. Wert had never seen one without it. They seem to him the most quick-tempered of man’s priests. Is this one reading the Koran, each time scowling up from a scroll half in his sleeve? No, he’s calling a roll—the names of people here. Each time he pronounces a name, Bakhtiary raises his own hand, in salute. Noises of assent come from the room here—an old woman’s long, wan agreement, a boy’s yell, quickly cut off, a man’s sobbing. The mullah is doing it by families. Each is having a different response. There are silences.

Up there on the video, it’s a duel between the two old men wielding their arms, one speaking, one mute. The mullah—a talon, a sleeve and a spitting voice protruding from the country those here have left—is he excommunicating? Standing right there, mouthing on, he’s fading; he’s upstaged. Hossein Bakhtiary, raising and lowering his right arm, on its wrist a watch like Fereydoun’s, in its palm a long-stemmed rose, is winning. And why not? He’s doing what these here have had to do. He’s saying good-bye.

The last of the names, sputtered unintelligibly, almost passes Wert by. Just then, Bakh removes his sunglasses. The hand grasping the teacolored flower moves forward, palm up. The eyes are the same. The mouth, closed until now, opens a swollen hole. Wert can hear its tongueless gurgle. Buh-Beel.

They bring on the bride.

Wert wants not to watch. Ahead of him, an elder is rotating worry-beads in steady pinwheel. There’s now no sound from this room, none of the woman-surf which hails a bride. Under the heavy headdress and costume which Ardebil has chosen for her, the slender body opens and closes obediently, a white fan manipulated from behind, twice refusing the gold bracelets offered her, a third time accepting, eyelashes fanned on her cheeks in the one close-up—while sugar is sprinkled by one of the two contending retinues, both sides in
chador. To sweeten the mother-in-law,
the announcer informs, his voice perfunctory. Even the camera is restive, disdaining this secondary creature with her trail of “old custom” dragging behind, and her not-to-be-dwelt-on life ahead—whose mother-in-law, dead in childbirth, as Wert happens to know, was a girl her own age, surely sweetened now by ninety years in the grave.

A camera is never embarrassed. One more flash for the bride’s “beauty,” whiter than the rest of her, then a close-up—of Bakh’s. The lens moves on to the brilliantly lit food tables, pointing out epergnes. The smell from the Queens kitchen mingles with them.

All the wedding gifts go to the nation.
They are on the longest table of all, in huge assortment, more ransacked than piled. The lens travels at table level, like a child’s eye. “Look—Grandpa’s silver samovar; did we give it?” a young girl two rows ahead hisses clearly. Finally, the camera traverses the crowd. There, tall as a trophy, between two mullahs, and behind him a third, is Manoucher.

Quiet now, not even a sound track humming. Over there in Iran, has noise been confiscated, too? Wert can hear the separate breathings around him—even at the end of his own row, from the nearer
chador.
The pinwheel up ahead has stopped.

A cry then from Manoucher’s wife, from the dais. “Manoucher! How thin you are. It is only five weeks.”

True. That same coat he was wearing in London now hangs on him. Taffy under the hot lights, it hangs from him in points, like his own flesh running from him. What are the seasons there now? Tabriz may be under snow, blue-glass afternoon ski slopes, with the brass samovar stuck in a drift. But Isfahan’s warmer. Why’s he wearing that coat?

The camera won’t answer. It’s scouring the façade of the hospital behind the crowd, running briefly over a plaque showing that Hossein Bakhtiary was donor of it, returning frantically to rock past the tables of loot, saying without a word, “Palace to palace, to nation…loot eternally.”

The smell from the kitchen here in Queens is imperative. In the deep iron skittles which they’ll have brought over here whatever else they left, the long-kerneled rice is forming that bottom-crust which will be scooped out like brown lace, to be screamed for by the children, dropped on the plates of the favorite. Left too much longer, it will burn. But up there on the screen, the plates on the food tables are yet unserved, the heaped melons, green under the false rays, will warm and rot in memory, or be left forever celadon; the camera’s done with them. Barging on, it’s pushing Bakhtiary’s chair, now seen to be on wheels, into the hospital façade; he’s in a room of bright chintz—a suite, it is, and once more he’s facing front. His hand no longer holds the rose. The dark glasses are on again. The bride is entering.

Where’s her retinue of family women? Gone. Frantically as a gossip columnist, the camera hunts for them, finding only bowls of roses on tables, underscoring banks of these nodding on the deep windowsills—there are roses everywhere! It probes the dewy heart of one of them, and floating dreamily on, finds the bed. A hospital one. Quickly away—though not too quickly. Find the couple who’ll lie on it. In a last roulade of the room, avoiding bric-a-brac now for final truth all in beautiful color, it finds them. Bakhtiary braces in his chair, his bride at his side. In the background, stage right, a
chador
’ed woman is briefly profiled, just entering. A proper royal touch. As the camera drains away, the married pair face it stolidly, like ancestors. It drains them away.

An announcer godspeeds them.
Ici Telefrance.

This is no ordinary wedding babble. People are crowding in front of the dais, hiding it. Wert rises. He ought to leave here. He’s going to learn too much. Six chairs away from him, the nearer
chador
’s now alone. He’s seeing it through the wrong end of the opera-glass, a minute ago big as life up on the video screen walking through that marriage-chamber door, then traveling thousands of miles to sit, infinitely reduced, on a folding chair. So that same pattern of dull gray flecked with orange is worn in Isfahan? How often with dark glasses as well?

Walking over he’s off balance, stepping through arranged illusion. He stands over it. How many
chadors
wear such perfume, expensive stuff, no raw musk. Or is he bewitched by video roses? How right he is to fear machine shadow-play for not even spying, for being only the colorless agent of connection. How pleased to find it negligent. A camera’s thought processes are as ingenuous as a child’s. Its sins of omission have to be similarly forgiven. He stares down at the feet beside his. Pink socks.

The
chador
is silent. Once it was their women’s desert mackintosh. Could they help it if their charms doubled inside it, or if they themselves doubled in another sense? What’s it like inside that tent now, for a girl dressed like any girl from Georgetown? Blazing with new thoughts, yet still pressed with harem voices? Under which the muddy current of the dynasts is always creeping anyway, even in the smartly bared flesh of the women he knows.

That wasn’t her doppelganger, up there just now in the honeymoon bedroom, yet somehow arrived here the day before yesterday—with those metallic words on her tongue: Programmer. Satellite. The apersonal procedures we give these people—they emotionalize even those to their own use.

Fereydoun said: Manoucher
was
there.

He bends over her. “What we saw and heard just now. It was a tape, wasn’t it?”

The sunglasses lift. They’re smoke-blue. He can just see her eyes behind them.

“Wasn’t it?”

The
chador
turns its back.

“Why?”

“Bakhtiary—wanted it.”

“Why?”

He can interrogate like this for hours. The
chador
hesitates; it can hear that. “The girl will have child.” There’s no dove-charm in this voice. “She is seven-months. The other picture was the real wedding.”

Up ahead, people are finally oozing into the next room, where the baked meats must be. He can wait for the gossips he’ll find there, unsure himself whether his revulsion is from cancer or death, or from such a child, ruthlessly inserted into life, between both. But that’s what miracles are. Violences aimed toward impossible good. Tears smart his eyes. “When was this…second ceremony?”

The
chador
considers. “Three days past…four? I—”

“Hadn’t a calendar, yes.” Why’s he so angry? “Why would Bakhtiary want it?”

“To help Manoucher. Everything—was for Manoucher.”

From the dais, Fereydoun, seeing them talk, shrugs at them, nodding. He’s supporting Madame on his arm.

“They all know then? That it was only tape?”

“Madame—Fereydoun was to tell her. Just before.”

No one’s helping Manoucher’s Soraya, still on the dais, eyes fixed on the empty video screen, hands dragging against her black. The
chador,
taking off its glasses, has dropped its veil. Offering her its face, if she wants it near. Manoucher’s wife's not looking, or not accepting.

“And Manoucher’s wife?”

“Madame must just have told her.”

Questions he doesn’t want to ask crowd his head. Ask the least of them. “Why are you in
chador?”

When she moves, closing herself up again, he can smell the perfume, waves of it. “It’s—quiet, like this. And I am not—too much here yet.”

Ask about her accent. Or run. “You were at school in Germany. Like Manouch?”

“Switzerland. Only Manoucher had to go to Germany. Like Madame. Then to England. Like Bakhtiary. It was the agreement.”

And afterward to us. And now finally, back to Iran.

Manoucher’s wife is standing up. In front of her, a train of women moves toward the next room, walking with the prinking body delays of the gauded-up. She walks starkly, but following. The girl from Ardebil’s baby will precede Manoucher’s and hers—if they ever have it—an infant aunt or uncle, to that putative nephew or niece. The father’s child will precede the son’s. No wonder their men love flowers, bending brotherly over them, their own body-gardens budding so inter-generationally.