Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Each night, says Molavi, the prisoner forgets his prison. Each night, he says, the tyrant forgets his power. Each night, when it seems the night will never end, when night appears to be the natural and unvarying condition of the universe, there is a breath of wind.
Invisible, the wind shows itself in a rattle of branches; and then, an instant later, in a coolness on my wrists and ankles, and where my daughter’s cheek slithers on my chest. For that instant, I smell greenery and roses and water and methane and the scent of my daughter’s hair to which I cannot give a name, except that it is the quintessence of sweetness, brought with her from wherever it is she came.
That breath of wind, which will not recur until this time tomorrow, is the only evidence of movement in my world: the sign that this house and garden, though I believe them to be stagnant and timeless, are subject to change. The wind, which originates out in the darkness, out beyond the town, in saltflats I have not seen, and passes through the town, blowing up sand at street-corners or flapping the tattered banners on the shrines of saints, exists both to make mehappy and to remind me of the insufficiency of happiness.
The wind passes. My daughter, whose name is Layly, stirs against my chest as if she might recall the breath across her cheek and legs, as in a repetitive game, but it is gone: blown out through the curtained archway to the room where my wife lies sleeping. I sense, as I sense always at this time, that as the gust enters the mosquito net, passes over her as she sleeps, across her cheek that is creased by the rucked sheet or stuck with a strand of damp black hair,or where the sheet has fallen away, and her skirt ridden up to her breast, for precisely this reason, that she might feel the wind over her sore belly; and as I hear her stir, open her legs so that the wind might cool the inside of her legs and dry the sweat that shivers in tiny droplets on the silken hair above them, I believe that a change is being worked in her. I believe that the pain of childbirth is receding from her, and in her sleep, which is not sleep as the world knows it, for it has no depth or freshness, she feels the impression of her husband. She stirs, turns, mumbles something from a dream. Her water cup tinkles. Something slides to the floor. I shiver. I kiss the child’s soft head and whisper: Settle down, my darling, and then I’ll put you in your crib, for your mother and I have something to discuss.
The child kicks out her feet, arches her soft back, sobs. My wife, whose physiology derives from Galen, says that Layly’s stomach is cold. I believe that the baby’s distress is caused by air that she has swallowed with her milk but yet may be dislodged by movement. I turn and continue my pacing across the floor, which is made of blocks of dead coral, smooth and warm with use and damp from my footprints.
For a year now, we have lived by window light. There is no moon tonight, only the flicker of a gas flare far out in the sea, and the premonition of dawn. By this light, and familiarity, I establish the room. Ahead of me is a framed print of the Shah in the character and uniform of Chief Scout of the Iranian Empire; and beside it, pendant to it, as it were, is a photograph of Stalin, hemmed in by country women wearing kerchiefs and carrying hay-rakes. Turning about, smartly, like a soldier, I confirm on my right a row of arches, closed by jalousies through which I can smell the sea; and in front of each pillar, a filing-cabinet, its drawers awry, spilling their contents. On my left is another arcade, and beyond it a terrace and a coral balustrade, a canopy of palm trees, a crazy wind-tower and a surging sun the colour of copper. Dazzled, and yet more sorrowful than dazzled, for the night is over and our ordeal begun, I look along my copper footprints, to the door of my wife’s room and beside it a table, covered in an old rug, and on top a coloured photograph in a frame that flashes back the yellow sun.
It is a portrait of a relation of my wife’s, whose name she doesn’t know, only his honorific: Amin ul Mulk, the Trustee of the Kingdom. What I know of him comes from a book he wrote or dictated called Safarnameh, or The Travel Diary, which was in the house when we came here, along with a Russian translation. I remember now that I look at this picture always at this time, so as to take strength to face the day.
In the spring of 1851, at about nineteen years of age, Amin travelled to Europe by way of Anzeli, Baku, Tiflis and Moscow. At St PPetersburg, he stood for hours before the fountains of the Peterhof. He observed manoeuvres at Potsdam. Sailing on an English warship from Kiel, he noted how the Captain led the sailors mustered on the fffffore- deck for their Sunday prayers. At Windsor Castle, he was troubled by the décolletage. For three weeks, each morning and afternoon he spent in the Hall of the Machines at Crystal Palace, where he was sketched by both Punch and Vanity Fair. He visited the ordnance yards at Woolwich, attended a review at Aldershot, danced a mazurka at Londonderry House. As a guest of Professor Paget at Holland Park, he received a succession of ex-Army men, seeking exclusive concessions in forests, mines, telegraphs, the cultivation of cotton, tobacco and opium, river navigation and railways, which gentlemen he answered diplomatically. In Paris, on 15 March 1853, he was photographed in Nadar’s studio in the Rue St-Georges. At the Brenner, his carriage overturned, but he sustained no injury. He stayed a year at Istanbul, then took service with the Tsar and at Sebastopol, on the Malakoff, on Christmas Day, 1855, he was blown to pieces by a British mortar.
In the photograph, Amin is seated on an ornate armchair in an embroidered robe-of-honour and the green turban of a descendant of the Prophet. He looks at the camera without surprise or curiosity, though I’m sure he’d never seen a camera or a photographer before. His left arm rests on a table draped in the kind of flat-woven rug called here a gelim; and though the photograph has been coloured by hand, it is certainly the same rug on which my wife has now placed the photograph. That congruence or echo, between the room that I am pacing with my daughter and the studio in the Rue St-Georges in Paris, never fails to unsettle me. Sometimes I don’t know where I am or when or who.
With his left index finger Amin points at another silver frame, or rather this frame at an earlier period of its existence, which contains a piece of gibberish. At the end of each traverse of the room, I am drawn into that silver frame within a frame, am cast back and forth between them and between the centuries, in an infinite and darkling enfilade as when two mirrors are placed to face each other. In my vertigo, the writing is forever trembling on the lip of sense. I feel it struggle to take form as Arabic or Persian or old Turkish, and fly at me; and yet there is something hopeless about the writing, left-handed, disconsolate, dead, forgotten. When I ask my wife, she says: How can I know, being a poor ignorant woman?
Twelve paces up. Twelve paces back. I think that if I could read what Amin had written, it would help me, and help him, wherever he is. You see I think it is his message to posterity, which is my wife, and my daughter, and, because I have no other family, myself. I think if I could understand it, forget myself a moment and plunge into it, as into a mirror; of course you third-class English, it has been printed in reverse, you need a mirror, a mirror, a mirror.
My wife is beautiful, or so it seems to me, but she possesses no mirror. It is not that she isn’t vain, for she is. She is absolutely certain of her beauty, intelligence, virtue, courage, piety, nobility of purpose and general superiority. I suppose she doesn’t need a mirror. She possesses a knife, which she keeps clean, but she wears it on a string across her bosom and takes it off when I ask her. I possess a revolver, which I also keep clean and always with me, and, raising my Layly high up on my left shoulder, and taking out the gun and blowing on the barrel and rubbing it on her shift, I read off Amin’s message to posterity.
It is not Arabic, but Persian, which is written in Arabic letters.
Daftar: ledger, notebook, exercise-book, desk, office.
Adamiyatra: humanity, can’t be anything else, like Adam and Eve.
Khali: empty, void.
Didam: I saw I turn and my wife is standing in the doorway. It always shocks me that she looks as she does and that she married me. Her dress and shawl are open on her breast and knife-belt and belly, her hair to her waist, her eyes slitted with short-sightedness and sleep. She smells of sugar and milk. The warmth of her body beats at me in gusts. She says: “‘I have seen the ledger of humanity and it is blank’.” It is strange for her to speak in English. Indeed, she refuses to speak either English or French and if, at a loss for a word, I use those languages, she looks at me without comprehension. I do not know why she has broken her rule or what caused Amin to lose his optimism. I feel if he could see her and our daughter, even if only for a moment of a moment, we would restore it to him, wherever he is.
She reaches out for the child and her breast trembles. She shakes down the right shoulder of her dress. The baby stirs and whimpers. I am winded by jealousy. I open my mouth to whisper something, about how much I also want her, that I too am hungry for her and have waited for her so long, and would wait some more, as long as necessary or proper, but not for ever, but I cannot make a sound and she is smiling at the baby at her breast.
As a child myself, I dreamed often of prison. Each time, at the instant that I felt I could not tolerate my existence, that it would be better to be dead than continue in that prison, my dream would lose its shape, become ragged or dissolve and reform as my familiar bedroom furniture; though traces of the dream remained, staining my desk or chair or in a pool in the corner by the wash- basin, acrid or caustic, even as the morning light re-established the room.
It is that sensation I have now, but in reverse, as in a mirror. My wife begins to lose her shape. She looks up from the baby’s face and smiles at me, as if to say, as she once said: It’s you I like in her, also, but she is retreating from me, perforated by a light that is not the light of the dream, but is none the less familiar. I reach out for them, but I have no reach for I too am retreating. Familiar sensations break in on me: grit against my cheek and bitter cold and the sound of doors banging, one by one by one. I believe I can save something of the dream, her scent or touch or at least that unmistakable sensation of herness, or the face of my little daughter, just as she looked at three months of age, but those, too, are going, going; and each crashing door shakes and shatters them, splinters them in the electric light, and, in a bang, in a burst of despair, I stand bolt upright, feet together, arms outstretched, head bowed, blindfold on.
Copyright © 1999 by James Buchan
Read a Sample Chapter
Chapter One
Each night, says Molavi, the prisoner forgets his prison. Each night, he says, the tyrant forgets his power. Each night, when it seems the night will never end, when night appears to be the natural and unvarying condition of the universe, there is a breath of wind.
Invisible, the wind shows itself in a rattle of branches; and then, an instant later, in a coolness on my wrists and ankles, and where my daughter's cheek slithers on my chest. For that instant, I smell greenery and roses and water and methane and the scent of my daughter's hair to which I cannot give a name, except that it is the quintessence of sweetness, brought with her from wherever it is she came.
That breath of wind, which will not recur until this time tomorrow, is the only evidence of movement in my world: the sign that this house and garden, though I believe them to be stagnant and timeless, are subject to change. The wind, which originates out in the darkness, out beyond the town, in saltflats I have not seen, and passes through the town, blowing up sand at street-corners or flapping the tattered banners on the shrines of saints, exists both to make mehappy and to remind me of the insufficiency of happiness.
The wind passes. My daughter, whose name is Layly, stirs against my chest as if she might recall the breath across her cheek and legs, as in a repetitive game, but it is gone: blown out through the curtained archway to the room where my wife lies sleeping. I sense, as I sense always at this time, that as the gust enters the mosquito net, passes over her as she sleeps, across her cheek that is creased by the rucked sheet orstuck with a strand of damp black hair, or where the sheet has fallen away, and her skirt ridden up to her breast, for precisely this reason, that she might feel the wind over her sore belly; and as I hear her stir, open her legs so that the wind might cool the inside of her legs and dry the sweat that shivers in tiny droplets on the silken hair above them, I believe that a change is being worked in her. I believe that the pain of childbirth is receding from her, and in her sleep, which is not sleep as the world knows it, for it has no depth or freshness, she feels the impression of her husband. She stirs, turns, mumbles something from a dream. Her water cup tinkles. Something slides to the floor. I shiver. I kiss the child's soft head and whisper: Settle down, my darling, and then I'll put you in your crib, for your mother and I have something to discuss.
The child kicks out her feet, arches her soft back, sobs. My wife, whose physiology derives from Galen, says that Layly's stomach is cold. I believe that the baby's distress is caused by air that she has swallowed with her milk but yet may be dislodged by movement. I turn and continue my pacing across the floor, which is made of blocks of dead coral, smooth and warm with use and damp from my footprints.
For a year now, we have lived by window light. There is no moon tonight, only the flicker of a gas flare far out in the sea, and the premonition of dawn. By this light, and familiarity, I establish the room. Ahead of me is a framed print of the Shah in the character and uniform of Chief Scout of the Iranian Empire; and beside it, pendant to it, as it were, is a photograph of Stalin, hemmed in by country women wearing kerchiefs and carrying hay-rakes. Turning about, smartly, like a soldier, I confirm on my right a row of arches, closed by jalousies through which I can smell the sea; and in front of each pillar, a filing-cabinet, its drawers awry, spilling their contents. On my left is another arcade, and beyond it a terrace and a coral balustrade, a canopy of palm trees, a crazy wind-tower and a surging sun the colour of copper. Dazzled, and yet more sorrowful than dazzled, for the night is over and our ordeal begun, I look along my copper footprints, to the door of my wife's room and beside it a table, covered in an old rug, and on top a coloured photograph in a frame that flashes back the yellow sun.
It is a portrait of a relation of my wife's, whose name she doesn't know, only his honorific: Amin ul Mulk, the Trustee of the Kingdom. What I know of him comes from a book he wrote or dictated called Safarnameh, or The Travel Diary, which was in the house when we came here, along with a Russian translation. I remember now that I look at this picture always at this time, so as to take strength to face the day.
In the spring of 1851, at about nineteen years of age, Amin travelled to Europe by way of Anzeli, Baku, Tiflis and Moscow. At St Petersburg, he stood for hours before the fountains of the Peterhof. He observed manoeuvres at Potsdam. Sailing on an English warship from Kiel, he noted how the Captain led the sailors mustered on the fore-deck for their Sunday prayers. At Windsor Castle, he was troubled by the décolletage. For three weeks, each morning and afternoon he spent in the Hall of the Machines at Crystal Palace, where he was sketched by both Punch and Vanity Fair. He visited the ordnance yards at Woolwich, attended a review at Aldershot, danced a mazurka at Londonderry House. As a guest of Professor Paget at Holland Park, he received a succession of ex-Army men, seeking exclusive concessions in forests, mines, telegraphs, the cultivation of cotton, tobacco and opium, river navigation and railways, which gentlemen he answered diplomatically. In Paris, on 15 March 1853, he was photographed in Nadar's studio in the Rue St-Georges. At the Brenner, his carriage overturned, but he sustained no injury. He stayed a year at Istanbul, then took service with the Tsar and at Sebastopol, on the Malakoff, on Christmas Day, 1855, he was blown to pieces by a British mortar.
In the photograph, Amin is seated on an ornate armchair in an embroidered robe-of-honour and the green turban of a descendant of the Prophet. He looks at the camera without surprise or curiosity, though I'm sure he'd never seen a camera or a photographer before. His left arm rests on a table draped in the kind of flat-woven rug called here a gelim; and though the photograph has been coloured by hand, it is certainly the same rug on which my wife has now placed the photograph. That congruence or echo, between the room that I am pacing with my daughter and the studio in the Rue St-Georges in Paris, never fails to unsettle me. Sometimes I don't know where I am or when or who.
With his left index finger Amin points at another silver frame, or rather this frame at an earlier period of its existence, which contains a piece of gibberish. At the end of each traverse of the room, I am drawn into that silver frame within a frame, am cast back and forth between them and between the centuries, in an infinite and darkling enfilade as when two mirrors are placed to face each other. In my vertigo, the writing is forever trembling on the lip of sense. I feel it struggle to take form as Arabic or Persian or old Turkish, and fly at me; and yet there is something hopeless about the writing, left-handed, disconsolate, dead, forgotten. When I ask my wife, she says: How can I know, being a poor ignorant woman?
Twelve paces up. Twelve paces back. I think that if I could read what Amin had written, it would help me, and help him, wherever he is. You see I think it is his message to posterity, which is my wife, and my daughter, and, because I have no other family, myself. I think if I could understand it, forget myself a moment and plunge into it, as into a mirror; of course you third-class English, it has been printed in reverse, you need a mirror, a mirror, a mirror.
My wife is beautiful, or so it seems to me, but she possesses no mirror. It is not that she isn't vain, for she is. She is absolutely certain of her beauty, intelligence, virtue, courage, piety, nobility of purpose and general superiority. I suppose she doesn't need a mirror. She possesses a knife, which she keeps clean, but she wears it on a string across her bosom and takes it off when I ask her. I possess a revolver, which I also keep clean and always with me, and, raising my Layly high up on my left shoulder, and taking out the gun and blowing on the barrel and rubbing it on her shift, I read off Amin's message to posterity.
It is not Arabic, but Persian, which is written in Arabic letters.
Daftar: ledger, notebook, exercise-book, desk, office.
Adamiyatra: humanity, can't be anything else, like Adam and Eve.
Khali: empty, void.
Didam: I saw
I turn and my wife is standing in the doorway. It always shocks me that she looks as she does and that she married me. Her dress and shawl are open on her breast and knife-belt and belly, her hair to her waist, her eyes slitted with short-sightedness and sleep. She smells of sugar and milk. The warmth of her body beats at me in gusts. She says:
"'I have seen the ledger of humanity and it is blank'."
It is strange for her to speak in English. Indeed, she refuses to speak either English or French and if, at a loss for a word, I use those languages, she looks at me without comprehension. I do not know why she has broken her rule or what caused Amin to lose his optimism. I feel if he could see her and our daughter, even if only for a moment of a moment, we would restore it to him, wherever he is.
She reaches out for the child and her breast trembles. She shakes down the right shoulder of her dress. The baby stirs and whimpers. I am winded by jealousy. I open my mouth to whisper something, about how much I also want her, that I too am hungry for her and have waited for her so long, and would wait some more, as long as necessary or proper, but not for ever, but I cannot make a sound and she is smiling at the baby at her breast.
As a child myself, I dreamed often of prison. Each time, at the instant that I felt I could not tolerate my existence, that it would be better to be dead than continue in that prison, my dream would lose its shape, become ragged or dissolve and reform as my familiar bedroom furniture; though traces of the dream remained, staining my desk or chair or in a pool in the corner by the wash-basin, acrid or caustic, even as the morning light re-established the room.
It is that sensation I have now, but in reverse, as in a mirror. My wife begins to lose her shape. She looks up from the baby's face and smiles at me, as if to say, as she once said: It's you I like in her, also, but she is retreating from me, perforated by a light that is not the light of the dream, but is none the less familiar. I reach out for them, but I have no reach for I too am retreating. Familiar sensations break in on me: grit against my cheek and bitter cold and the sound of doors banging, one by one by one. I believe I can save something of the dream, her scent or touch or at least that unmistakable sensation of herness, or the face of my little daughter, just as she looked at three months of age, but those, too, are going, going; and each crashing door shakes and shatters them, splinters them in the electric light, and, in a bang, in a burst of despair, I stand bolt upright, feet together, arms outstretched, head bowed, blindfold on.
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