twenty-eighth, we would be honored to receive you. My father’s shop is at 9763 Westwood, near Ohio. Islamic Arts.”
Mowbray had said something along these lines when first told about the fellowship: “You do know what you’re getting into? Throw out a question, and you’re liable to find people in every corner of the room coming up with answers.”
When first he’d arrived in Santa Barbara, he’d made it his practice to go every morning to the first-floor room in the library where they kept the foreign newspapers. Looking at last week’s copy of The Guardian had seemed a way of keeping up some kind of connection with home (even with Martine). Then he’d thought back to why he’d come here in the first place—saw his parents silently raging against the small house they’d inherited—and never returned to the room again.
The day after the phone call, though, almost on instinct, he went back to the small barred cell of fading print, and found a place among the homesick boys from Bangalore and the engineers from Taiwan, poring over their ideograms. The Iran Daily News, as it happened, was in the same aisle as The Independent, and as he lost himself in the exile paper from Los Angeles, he found himself with the Iranians to the south, doing everything they could, far from home, to keep alive some memory of a place they loved.
“Black became white for us, north was south,” wrote a doctor from Shemiran, in the column the paper reserved each week for a reminiscence of Iran. “And all the things we loved were raped. Our Queen, we were told, was sending jewels, carpets, diaries to Palm Springs, and Jimmy Carter was reciting Saadi at a banquet in Tehran. The British ambassador was visiting the Pahlavis on Paradise Island, but he came to them with a false name, a false passport. Meanwhile, the people in the villages, in Qom, Mashhad, listened to the BBC World Service for news of their Hidden Imam.”
Now, of course—the man hardly needed to spell it out—it was he who was most likely living under a false name and identity: doctors from Tehran were working as antique dealers in West Los Angeles, and antique dealers moonlighted as immigration lawyers. At night, it was rumored, they gathered in somebody’s house, under cover of dark, and brought themselves together with their stories of escape: the nighttime flight across the mountains on horseback, the old woman next door stoned to death on the street.
He thought back to what Sefadhi had said, and realized that, as with all the professor’s comments, it hid more meanings than he had seen at first. If so little was known of Shakespeare (whom he loved, what he wrote, even who he was)—this had been his implication— how much less could we know of poets from a culture that had not even seen printing till five hundred years after their deaths? To search for a lost manuscript was like searching for a silent whisper; and even if you did come upon something that might be valuable, to say where it had come from was like picking up a grain of sand and saying which part of the desert it had issued from.
The seminar the following week passed painlessly enough: the Sufis were in such vogue now in California—Gloria Steinem writing on fanasha as a symbol of female power, Demi Moore and Madonna said to be reciting Rumi verses on a CD to be put out by Deepak Chopra—that no one looked very much askance when he began speaking of the hidden liberator, the unlikely stranger in Sufism who turned out to be a catalyst. “Love for the Sufis is not so much blind as a kind of higher vision,” he found himself saying, and one or two people around the table nodded. When he told the story of Nasruddin, the holy fool of Sufism, looking for a key under a lamppost, Elaine actually burst into laughter. Why did he look there? the eccentric old man was asked. Because, he said, though he’d lost the key indoors, there was more light to look for it out in the street.
“And, of course,”
Mowbray had said something along these lines when first told about the fellowship: “You do know what you’re getting into? Throw out a question, and you’re liable to find people in every corner of the room coming up with answers.”
When first he’d arrived in Santa Barbara, he’d made it his practice to go every morning to the first-floor room in the library where they kept the foreign newspapers. Looking at last week’s copy of The Guardian had seemed a way of keeping up some kind of connection with home (even with Martine). Then he’d thought back to why he’d come here in the first place—saw his parents silently raging against the small house they’d inherited—and never returned to the room again.
The day after the phone call, though, almost on instinct, he went back to the small barred cell of fading print, and found a place among the homesick boys from Bangalore and the engineers from Taiwan, poring over their ideograms. The Iran Daily News, as it happened, was in the same aisle as The Independent, and as he lost himself in the exile paper from Los Angeles, he found himself with the Iranians to the south, doing everything they could, far from home, to keep alive some memory of a place they loved.
“Black became white for us, north was south,” wrote a doctor from Shemiran, in the column the paper reserved each week for a reminiscence of Iran. “And all the things we loved were raped. Our Queen, we were told, was sending jewels, carpets, diaries to Palm Springs, and Jimmy Carter was reciting Saadi at a banquet in Tehran. The British ambassador was visiting the Pahlavis on Paradise Island, but he came to them with a false name, a false passport. Meanwhile, the people in the villages, in Qom, Mashhad, listened to the BBC World Service for news of their Hidden Imam.”
Now, of course—the man hardly needed to spell it out—it was he who was most likely living under a false name and identity: doctors from Tehran were working as antique dealers in West Los Angeles, and antique dealers moonlighted as immigration lawyers. At night, it was rumored, they gathered in somebody’s house, under cover of dark, and brought themselves together with their stories of escape: the nighttime flight across the mountains on horseback, the old woman next door stoned to death on the street.
He thought back to what Sefadhi had said, and realized that, as with all the professor’s comments, it hid more meanings than he had seen at first. If so little was known of Shakespeare (whom he loved, what he wrote, even who he was)—this had been his implication— how much less could we know of poets from a culture that had not even seen printing till five hundred years after their deaths? To search for a lost manuscript was like searching for a silent whisper; and even if you did come upon something that might be valuable, to say where it had come from was like picking up a grain of sand and saying which part of the desert it had issued from.
The seminar the following week passed painlessly enough: the Sufis were in such vogue now in California—Gloria Steinem writing on fanasha as a symbol of female power, Demi Moore and Madonna said to be reciting Rumi verses on a CD to be put out by Deepak Chopra—that no one looked very much askance when he began speaking of the hidden liberator, the unlikely stranger in Sufism who turned out to be a catalyst. “Love for the Sufis is not so much blind as a kind of higher vision,” he found himself saying, and one or two people around the table nodded. When he told the story of Nasruddin, the holy fool of Sufism, looking for a key under a lamppost, Elaine actually burst into laughter. Why did he look there? the eccentric old man was asked. Because, he said, though he’d lost the key indoors, there was more light to look for it out in the street.
“And, of course,”
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