Black Light

  The moonlight drenched him as he walked across the sand. His mind blurred. Suddenly he remembered the time he had caught himself beating his daughter when she was small—or about to beat her—ferociously—for some trivial offense—or was it for none at all? And a year or so ago, when Leyla had malaria and he gave her a pomegranate, which he had kneaded to break up the cells within, and she had pierced the rind with her teeth, and sucked it, and all its juices had flowed out. Then she grasped his hand and drew him down on the bed beside her. Her lips were stained red and a trickle of pomegranate juice was running down her chin. She appeared in his eyes like some Ishtar of the old religions. “Kiss me, father,” she said. He kissed her on the lips. With a shock he drew back. Was it only that he suddenly realized that she had become a woman, rich in passion like the woman he had lost, and had drawn back merely stung with desolation? Or in the mouth that pressed so yieldingly against his, did he think he could detect a buried sexual urgency? Or was it that he discovered a hideous element in his own feelings? Whatever it might have been, she had seen his fright only too plainly.

  As he headed back toward the rock, he felt apprehension for Ali. Recalling that savage face he felt reassured. The night was silent and steeped in light. His thoughts went back to Leyla. ‘A slut. . . .’ He realized that on occasions when he had lost his temper with her it had been nearly always on account of boys. They had kept hanging around . . . Once he had broached the subject of marrying off his daughter to the wool-beater. “It’s true, as a wool-beater, I beat second-hand wool,” was all the man had said in reply.

  Jamshid saw the great rock in the moonlight. As he approached it the world seemed to become deserted. A deadness came into the air. There was something poisonous about the moonlight. The rock alone seemed to live. A struggle seemed to be taking place on its glistening surface. Its black light cast straight down on the earth, illuminated a broken form. Jamshid ran over. In the blackness he found the body of the old man. The shears were sticking out of his chest just as they had out of Torbati’s.

  “Curse me to burn in hell,” Ali whispered, bleeding at the mouth. “Five of them came . . . five . . . they saw me somehow . . . I got one on the arm . . . curse these ears . . . curse me for one who’s getting old and deaf . . .” The blood was coming from his mouth. “They’ll be back soon,” Ali said. “Help me to the camel . . .” With his arms around Jamshid’s neck he started to pull himself up. The blood that had overflowed from his mouth while he was on his back now poured down. He let go and fell back. He took hold of the shears and tried to pull them free. Unable to speak, he turned toward Jamshid with a furious, imploring eye. Jamshid took the old hands from the shears. Ali clutched at his hand; then the grip faded out.

  “Take these remains back to Shiraz,” Ali whispered, “I beg you, my friend.”

  Jamshid succeeded in getting the dead body lashed across the camel with the carpet covering it. Hassan rose with this burden into the moonlight.

  chapter nine

  Jamshid kept walking all night, through the yellow-green dawn, and into the daylight. He was moving automatically, only partly awake. It was not until nightfall that he reached rocky ground, where Hassan would not leave tracks. He lay down beside a spring, under some poplars that shut out the moon.

  He awoke feeling the flopping of Hassan’s jowls across his face. He sat up. It was the first glimmer of dawn. The camel’s face, usually staid and sardonic, appeared now to be grinning. The half-closed eyes were almost satanic. There was blood on his face. Jamshid touched his own face. Blood came away on his hand.

  Now he spied the bird that Hassan had just sliced in two. The black body lay a little way from the white head, with its peaceful, closed eyes. The head and body seemed parts of different animals. Jamshid got to his feet. A hole had been ripped in the carpet. Three other white-headed birds sat without moving in the farthest poplar tree. Jamshid took the rope and started forward again. When he looked back the birds were gone.

  He leaned on the rope. The sun was hot. The corpse was starting to smell. He took the rope by its very end and walked faster, hoping to outpace the smell, but it seemed to lie in the air he was walking into. It was a putrid, sweetish odor. It was a flaw in nature, he thought, that a person should turn so abruptly into this smell.

  In the afternoon, as he was passing some rocks, a man stepped out and came toward him. Jamshid wanted to ask the way. Apparently smelling the body, the man fell back.

  “Wait,” Jamshid said. “It’s only my poor father I’m taking to burial. Don’t be afraid, he had no disease.”

  But the man ran far among the rocks. Standing on a high rock so he could be seen, he called back, “Don’t you know that if a man alone carries a corpse, the devil seizes him and stains him even to the ends of his nails, and he is unclean forever? Moslem dog! Be gone!”

  Puzzled and shaken, Jamshid kept walking. He supposed it would be weeks before he could reach Shiraz. Even if he managed to keep off the birds, the flesh would have rotted. How was he to pass through villages while giving off this odor which no one could fail to recognize? It was a hopeless journey. If he was going to have to get rid of the corpse anyway, then the sooner the better. Maybe he should just chuck it where he was. Let the birds have it now, he thought, rather than later.

  While he was wondering what he should do he came to a tower on a hillside overlooking the desert. He scrambled up the stone exterior to see if he could see any pursuers. As he came to the rim he paused and sniffed. Ali’s very odor met him there. For it was a dokhmeh, a tower on which the Zoroastrians expose their dead to be eaten by vultures. Doubtless the man who had accused him by the rock was a Zoroastrian. On the circular roof were strewn a hundred or more human remains, most of them skeletons draped in bleached, torn clothing. A few were still bloody. They lay face up, the knees opened as if to first offer their genitals, source of most of their troubles. Jamshid wandered among them. He came to the bone-pit, a vast hole down the center of the tower, into which had been swept thousands of immaculate skulls and bones.

  He had felt horror at first, but he grew accustomed to these open graves in about the time it takes eyes to grow accustomed to a change of light. This seemed the regular way to move, this picking his way through old, slightly stylized scraps of men and women—of children, too, he noted, stepping over some tiny bones.

  He thought of what the old darvish had said about Zoroastrian customs. That to bury a dead man in the earth would befoul earth. That to drop him in the sea would befoul water. That to burn him would befoul fire. That to let him decompose would befoul air. It was for the birds, creatures who were essentially corrupt, and also, therefore, slightly sacred, to transmute dead flesh into the sky. Are the dead really foul? Jamshid wondered. It was true Ali was stinking. But it seemed to him now that if he had loved Ali it was not entirely for the shine of his spirit, it was also for the glittering darkness of his flesh and bones. Once the light was gone, was the remnant suddenly worthless and foul? Only his own nose, after all, was offended. God did not care about bad smells, nor did Hassan the camel. Nor did the sand and the sky. He decided, cost what it may, he would bear the corpse as far toward Shiraz as he could. In time, if he were faithful enough, his own nose might learn not to notice it. He went to the edge of the tower and put a leg over to descend. As he glanced down he failed to see Hassan.

  Now he saw him, galloping across the desert in the sunlight, several birds hovering high above him. “Hassan! Hassan!” he called, but the huge panicked animal was in full gallop and out of earshot.

  On the spot where the camel had been was a water flask and a dead bird. Jamshid picked up the flask and set out after the camel. Underfoot it was sandy again, and there were tracks to follow. He walked a long way. Night fell. It was one more night of bright moonlight.

  At last he saw the hoof marks coming closer together. Soon he could make out Hassan’s dark shape on the sand. A bird rose from it and vanished. The carpet had been torn. Much of Ali’s flesh was gone
. Jamshid bent by Hassan’s head. With his fingers he drew up one of the great eyelids. The pupil inside wheeled itself down in the moonlight, and the eye was looking at the space occupied by Jamshid. He put his arms around the camel’s neck and held its enormous sorrowful face against his own.

  chapter ten

  When Jamshid opened his eyes he felt he could go no further, partly out of hunger and exhaustion, partly out of desolation. And partly out of a sense of cruel fatality. He had spent all those years in Meshed weaving closed the gaps, as if he had thought that if you perfected a surface what it was laid upon no longer had to be reckoned with. Now that he had broken through the surface, it seemed he had no choice anymore but to die into the essential foulness of things.

  There remained the corpse of Ali to be carted to his native place. Only this called Jamshid out of his lassitude. He pulled himself onto the camel’s back, just aft of the body. He hissed. Hassan opened his eye. Jamshid hissed and kicked. Hassan rumbled and slowly cranked himself into the air, hind and fore legs alternately straightening their hinges, until he stood upright. Jamshid kept himself just awake enough to steer the camel away from villages and to keep from falling off.

  At intervals Hassan sank unbidden to the ground and dozed off. At these times Jamshid rolled off and rested beside him. The carpet-covered remains never left the camel’s back. Nor was Jamshid any longer tempted to borrow the carpet to put between himself and the earth.

  He could always sense the blackness of vultures in the sky. Never visible, they were a constant presence. One day it seemed to Jamshid the body was smelling less badly. Or was he now getting used to it? He smelled his own arm, and it seemed to give off the same odor. Through the shredded carpet Jamshid could see the corpse had become infested. It would be a miracle, he thought, if the corpse worms hadn’t kept on going and infested Hassan too.

  His perch went in lumbering circles, like the motion of a cow’s jaws, or of soup being stirred. Sometimes as he rolled and pitched he actually smelt salt air, which came in little gusts and refreshed him. He imagined a boat on the sea must move this way too.

  Now, as it seemed to Jamshid he was on his way to die, he began to think of his dead wife. It had always been painful for him to think of her. Whenever he had visited her grave with its one red brick for a headstone, he had restricted himself to the forms of propitiating the dead. As for memories of her while she lived, he did not like them or want to probe into them.

  It was a mistake to begin with, that marriage, Jamshid thought. He had been but twenty-two and Cobra only fourteen. His father had arranged it in the last months of his life, so as to leave no loose thread behind. It brought to a close a decade of piety and hard work, begun the day Varoosh had left Meshed, while just a boy. Though she was young, she had been strong and graceful, with huge black eyes and a straight, rich, sensual mouth. He had fallen in love with her at once. He had been immediately aware, too, that this love was not returned. He had sensed catastrophe, but he had reasoned that marriage itself might well even the balance, giving some love to her side, and if necessary taking some away from his own.

  The ground began to rise. Hassan had to go more slowly. Jamshid thought back on the early days spent repairing the torn carpets and trying not to think too much about Cobra. After the evening prayer he would come home and sit by the pool in the garden, smoking the waterpipe, watching Cobra preparing the evening meal. He was moved by her grace, and increasingly disturbed by her aloofness and mystery. Sometimes she seemed direct and open, and often she was in good spirits. But just as often she would start brooding for reasons Jamshid never discovered. So it would go. She would listen attentively when he talked and if he tried to make a joke she would laugh. Before long she seemed only to be trying to focus on his words and stopped bothering to laugh. Far from understanding what she was feeling at these times, he did not even know what he felt himself. The only thing he knew was that she had become an obsession. He had been brought up to think that a wife was a minor adjunct in one’s life, and he was bewildered at the turn this marriage had taken. When at last he did decide to assume the traditional male role and subdue his wife through force of tradition, it was as a last resort.

  He told Cobra how to dress and carry the chaddor; how to shop; how to serve foods; how to divide up her day; how to show and not show her feelings; and so on. Thus he hoped to gain mastery and turn her into a true wife. It had begun well enough. And for a little while after Leyla’s birth Jamshid actually believed he might win her complete submission, which he was ready to accept as the next best thing to her love. But soon he observed a distinct slackening. He redoubled his law-giving, only to find worse instances of her falling off. One day he told her she was to keep her face from the sunlight so that the skin might remain pale. Not a week later he came home to find she had been playing with the baby for hours with her face and neck exposed and was brown as the earth. He made it clear he did not want her mouth or one hair of her head to show in public. The next day he looked from his shop window to see her crossing the street with her entire head uncovered to all viewers. After each transgression he would lecture her, at first patiently, and at last angrily, in a style he had picked up from his father. Nothing helped. All his efforts turned out to be self-defeating. The more he demanded, the less he got. The gulf between them had been very wide, when, eighteen months after their marriage, while Jamshid was engaged in prayer at the Shah Mosque, Cobra died.

  Jamshid had been on the point, he often told himself, of trying to reach across to her. But now he understood he had been afraid to try. It occurred to him that perhaps Cobra’s death had come to him almost as a relief. It had been Mullah Torbati, he reflected bitterly, who had helped him shut her from his mind by intimating that from the fact that she died it could be deduced that she deserved to die.

  They were mounting a steep rock slope, and Hassan was laboring unnaturally. His life back in Meshed appeared by comparison unreal, made up as it was of rules that only spoiled any chances there might have been. The words ‘slut’ and ‘murderer’ lost their meaning. All that seemed important now was to bring the remains of Ali back to the earth of Shiraz.

  Hassan gained the top of the rock hill. As he began to descend, he lost his footing and fell heavily on his side. Jamshid was thrown to the ground. He got up and urged the camel to right itself. It heaved into a crouch, but at once toppled over again. Bending beside him Jamshid lifted an eyelid. It came up with difficulty. The black pupil remained wide open, looking into the absolute darkness. When Jamshid let go the eyelid dropped halfway down, giving the camel a comical, drowsy air.

  A few feet away, in the stone cliffside, Jamshid saw the entrance to a cave. He separated the two corpses, and dragged Ali’s toward it. Inside it was cold and very dark. He went out to the saddle bags and got a candle. By its light he found an open, scooped out sarcophagus, made of the stone that is called ‘flesh-eating’. It seemed to be waiting for a corpse. He put Ali’s corpse into it arranged more or less in the order of life. Then he stretched himself out on the stone floor. It took great effort to rise on an elbow. As he drew in his breath to blow out the candle he noticed the point of the flame, that shifting instant where the flame was turning into pure spirit. Then he blew it out. His bones seeming to lie directly against the stone, he fell into deep sleep.

  chapter eleven

  When Jamshid woke it seemed more pleasant in the cave than when he had fallen asleep. During the night he had come to terms, it seemed, with the stone and darkness, and the corpse smell had vanished. He went toward the light.

  The framed sunlit scene seemed set up for him as an ultimate landscape of desolation. Before him was a vast field of stone ruins—ruins that were pure and absolute, that gave little hint of what they had once been except that whatever it was had been of an extraordinary magnificence. Below him hundreds of empty pedestals stood carefully spaced out on the ground. Around them on four sides were the frameworks of vanished walls, walls of nothing in which the empty
frameworks of doors and windows opened their holes. Beyond, on a distant rise, were many huge fluted columns, some broken, some reaching the old altitude, holding up nothing. Jamshid realized this place was Takhte Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, the ruins of what had once been the springtime capital of Iran in its greatness. The cave in which he stood was a tomb to house the remains of one of the Achemenian kings. Brushing the old dust from his pajamas, Jamshid stepped into the sunlight.

  It was the afternoon light.

  Nearby he saw Hassan’s bloody skeleton. While Jamshid had slept, the camel had been almost entirely devoured. The harness still wrapped the empty, scraped bones, the saddle frame still gripped the lost back. The saddlebags had been torn off and ripped open. Blue and yellow plastic spoons lay scattered about.

  He saw the face of Hassan as he had last seen it, drowsy, even dead keeping an ineradicable haughtiness. He thought of burying what was left, but the hill was rock, with only tiny pools of sand. If it was the nature of birds to eat this flesh, let them eat it. If it was the nature of the sun to bleach bones, then let it bleach these.

  To cover the remains of Ali, Jamshid walked back and forth many times between the sunlight and the cave, carrying handfuls of sand. When he thought he had put on enough sand to cover the body he lit the candle. He was surprised to see the handles of the shears still sticking out of the body. For a moment he was back in his shop in Meshed, bending over the dead mullah. The saddle had pressed the shears deep into the breastbone. When he thought they were coming free, he saw it was only that the whole rib cage was beginning to lift off. He tried to push it down again but sand had slid under, and he had to bring in more sand. He left the shears where they were. As the candle gutted and gave a last flare, he pressed his hand into the sand, leaving a hand print, the mark which peasants, with painted hands, put on the walls in their villages, in remembrance of the martyrs.