Black Light (10 page)

chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-three

H
e was awakened by drizzling rain. It was the first rainfall of the year. The goat had come in under the tree too, and was sleeping next to him. He got up and went out into the streets. It was still dark, and the streets were quite deserted. The rain was falling very lightly. The dirt underfoot, trampled by so many footsteps, did not turn to mud but only grew a little slick.

As he walked past the dark houses his skull felt struck by a piece of iron. His head began ringing and aching. The other pain started up again at his chest, with sharp claws pressing toward his heart. He sat down in a doorway.

A few matches remained in his pocket. He felt anguish at the thought that they would get wet. He searched the ground. He found a bit of silverfoil and dried it as best he could. He wrapped it tightly around the matches, sealing the package well to make it waterproof. He was shivering.

He sat there most of the day. His shivering kept him from falling asleep. When at last it started to grow dark he got up and wandered through the quarter.

He saw a rich-looking man with a furled umbrella. He was strolling along and peering into doorways and alleys.
This one, Jamshid observed, actually shone with the gold coins hidden all over him. Jamshid realized he could not interest someone like this man in so dowdy and plump a woman as Effat. But now he remembered this was the day the new girl was to start work.

With the pain gripping at his heart, he stepped forward and spoke.

“Excuse me.” He was hardly able to get out these words. Yet the moment the words were uttered the pain lifted completely from his heart. “Excuse me, if it happens you're looking for a pretty girl . . .” He felt the inner, almost invincible strength of one who knows he is living the decisive moment. “I believe I can be of service . . .” The rich man stopped and turned to face him. “She's pretty . . . I could say beautiful . . .” He felt now as if a poem were about to spring from his lips. “A pure light dancing over the ground . . . ground full of bones . . .” Swinging with both hands, the man slammed his umbrella across Jamshid's face.

“Dirty pimp!” the man cried. Jamshid clutched at his face. The man stood staring at him, as if waiting for him to fall dead. Jamshid stared back . . . he noticed now the hooded eyes . . . the wide mouth. . . . Suddenly the expression on the face twisted into a grimace of horror . . . and the man vanished.

“Goli, run for the pharmacist!” Effat said, when Jamshid staggered into the courtyard. “He's just down the alley suctioning the last drops of honest blood out of poor Simeen. Somebody's hit Jamshid with a sword. Who did it?” Effat asked, as Goli ran out.

Those eyes . . . the mouth. . . . What else could account for that look of horror? If it
had
been Varoosh, what kind of man would break open someone's face just for being a pimp?

“I don't know,” Jamshid said, suddenly seeing himself standing over the dead body of the mullah, “just somebody, a stranger.”

Jamshid watched the hag who crouched in the doorway.

As the pharmacist—a different one—applied the bandage, he said, “Look at her! Some phony darvish talked her into buying a whole case of his ‘Syphilis Potion'! In reality it's surplus rat poison. It was sold off cheap because the rats couldn't stand to go near it. It only burns her sores and keeps them infected. You can't take it away from her, though, or she'll rip you to pieces. She'd be better off if she'd drink it.”

Jamshid wanted to ask the pharmacist about the sores that seemed to be appearing on his loins and thighs, but just then Mehre started crawling toward him.

“Get away, filthy crone,” the pharmacist said. He quickly packed his black satchel and walked out.

Jamshid had not remembered to take Ali's old carpet in. It lay soaked in mud under the tree. It seemed the earth was actually absorbing it. He threw himself down on the rectangle where it lay. Pain flashed at his crotch again. He wondered if he had caught something just from touching Goli—or, in the sterile dust at Takhte Jamshid, had he made love with the mad woman in his sleep—and passed on her germs to the widow, keeping, to be sure, plenty for himself? He had not meant to cause very much harm in the world, he thought. But what he had meant seemed to have no relation to anything. He lay there groaning.

“Jamshid!” Effat cried. “Why have you thrown yourself in the mud? You've gone crazy too! Get in here. I'm putting you in with the girl tonight, on account of the rain. By the way, she's pretty, and even younger than Goli.
I've told her to be good to you, if you should feel inclined. . . . Nothing's a better cure for sadness.”

She spoke cheerfully. But Jamshid could see in her eyes she was troubled. “Jamshid,” she said, at the foot of the stairs, “I've only learned one thing in my life.” Jamshid turned. “It's that nothing matters.”

“Nothing?” said Jamshid.
“Nothing?”
Effat smiled broadly.

“Nothing at all.”

chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-four

J
amshid could hear the girl breathing across the room. In the New City he had felt desire only in imagining the widow. That promise on the horizon of a new beginning, however faintly it glowed—and never so faintly as now—was his tie to another life, a second world, and it put a barrier—perhaps mostly of pity—between him and these other women, who had only this one. Now, in this darkness which seemed to consist of the breaths, in and out, of an unknown girl across the room, the barrier suddenly vanished. He felt come over him an intense sexual longing.

He raised himself on an elbow, and looked in the girl's direction. The room was completely dark. It was a little like that darkness in Shiraz in which he had awaited the widow. As if the darkness itself were some kind of candlelight. He looked around him. Though it was totally dark, he felt he could see the photographs of beautiful women that were pasted all over the invisible walls.

He crossed the room. Kneeling at the girl's bedside, he heard the huge, passionate gasps of her body clamoring for air. It gasped with the ruthless will of an infant sucking at the breast. It was funny, he thought, how at night
a person clings savagely to a life that, in the daytime, he only wants to throw away.

He could smell the girl's odor, bright and bewildering. With his hand he touched the smooth, hot skin of her arm. Sharp pains wriggled through his loins. He drew his hand away. And yet possibly it wasn't his disease that was hurting him, but the pain of desire. He reached out and touched her again.

Her breathing seemed to grow slightly deeper. He could not tell if she were awake or asleep. Surely asleep. And yet her nipples rose under his fingertips, and when he touched her belly it seemed to cave in a little under the caress.

“Ah, it's you,” the girl said, waking suddenly, “the old man Effat said to be good to. That's fine with me. She says you're nice. Come in with me.” Jamshid slid under her blanket. He moved his hand over the mound of hair. The gash between the thighs was wet and open. He opened it wide with his hand. The odor flared, like a dropped bottle of perfume.

He moved on top of her and thrust apart the loose thighs and pushed in. As he put his arms around her he felt on her back several tiny welts. Effat had shown him the little bumps on her own back where men had stubbed out their cigarettes. . . . He seemed to hear her sob. If so the sound had come from a great distance, a small cry from far down a street, heard at the moment a motor starts up and drowns it out. Some last, useless appeal. Her mouth kissed him back, her pelvis tipped up to meet him, she came alive down the length of her body. . . . They moved slowly . . . now more quickly, as a river gradually finds its bed deepening . . .

Jamshid lay looking up at the darkness. He felt no joy or peace. He remembered his disease. He felt only apprehension. Beside him the girl gave a low sigh. The sound
caught in his mind. It had a familiar tone. . . . He abruptly dropped this idea. Yet his heart started to beat fast. . . . Now that he thought about it, there had been something so familiar in her voice. He did not dare speak, in case it was true. He put his hand out and felt her face. As he felt her he could see her. Yes. The eyebrows . . . the forehead . . . the cheekbones just so . . . the nose, exactly . . . the lips . . . chin. . . . He got to his feet and snatched up his clothes and plunged half falling down the stairs.

“
Nothing?
” he gasped, “
nothing?
”

He thought he would vomit but retched uselessly.

If only he could die. And as he was wishing to die he heard the sound of snoring—two snores—one deep-throated, made of groans and harsh warbles, one a high, empty rattle—now coming in alternating step like a thing with a limp, now one overtaking the other, now joined in sisterly unison. He stared swollen-eyed at the mud. The pains started up again in his crotch, first in crawling flashes, now as if actual fires burned in him. Tears poured down his face. The snores drew apart once more, and the high rattle resonated in Jamshid's mind. He realized he did know how to die.

He looked in at the open door. Effat was tossing under her huge tremors. Mehre lay trembling and shaking. Goli was heaped in a stiff and silent bundle in the corner. He stepped in. The snoring grew louder. Goli suddenly started up a wheezing, gasping snore. As Jamshid tiptoed toward Mehre's bed the noise continued to increase. It was like a jungle at night. He knelt now at the hag's bedside. Reaching across, he groped down in the space between the wall and the bed. His hand struck a bottle and knocked it against another with a little clang. He withdrew his hand and froze. All the snores stopped at once.

One by one, they resumed. He groped again for the bottle. The noise of the snores seemed to grow louder. It was as if the sounds had slid over some last edge of the human world. The room filled with deep, throaty noises of animal suffering. A breath gurgled like a new baby as it went in, and death-rattled as it went out. There arose a great seething, tearing, sucking noise, of an enormous mouth gobbling compulsively at life itself.

Jamshid touched a bottle. As he snatched it up, a claw tore at his arm and another grappled at his belly. . . . He wrenched himself from the hag's clutches and stumbled out the door.

In the courtyard, he unscrewed the cap and tipped the jar to drink. Nothing flowed. He held it up to the light. In the bottom of the jar lay something caked and pink. He smelled it. Face powder, a century old. He hurled the jar at the pool.

Now Jamshid saw the hag was dragging herself toward him, and he ran into the street. He kept running until he came to the gate, that passage back to the world. He wished only to throw himself at a policeman and beg him to shoot him on the spot. But he could not see a policeman. He stopped and looked about. As he stood there a man walked past him and continued to walk through the gate and out the other side. Jamshid was astonished. The gate was not guarded. He was free.

chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-five

F
rayed branches hung all about him. Ahead, in the open world, it was no longer raining. Against the pale sky the corners, angles, and rectangular markings of the buildings began to define themselves. Any minute the whole place was going to blaze up in gorgeous color and to fill with symmetrical trees and great emblematic birds. And if donkeys walking out there with mincing, effeminate tread were to happen to cry out, their cries would be bright and lucid, like shepherds' pipes, or young girls' laughter.

He looked across the threshold at the world where his new life would begin. But how could he step out there? Wasn't he kin to those filthy, dark beings which, in his shop in Meshed, he had so desperately tried to hide and do away with? He did not know if he had the right to pass through. He stood still, trying to keep from staggering.

A girl was walking down the street behind him. He turned and looked at her. For an instant he thought it must be Leyla. He couldn't be sure. He studied her face as she moved past him. It made him draw in his breath. What was it that caused the radiance in her features? It was a light coming from paradise. Tears stung his eyes. He guessed
that it was, just as likely, a light reflected up from some fire of dread or disgust in her breast.

From a garden somewhere in the New City he heard a cock crowing. Perhaps, he thought, it is a bird of paradise, the original one, crowing in the mud. Jamshid sat down in a doorway. He stared at the empty gate. He took out his little package of matches and opened it. He struck one against the wooden door. Was it the match, or the wood, that was damp? He struck another. This did not light either. The world was dark, and we who inhabit it are also dark. He struck another, and another. He wanted now, more than anything, to see. Then he struck the last match. It flared a shrill, yellow, upwardly blackening flame. He got up and passed through the gate under the distant pale sky of early morning.

a note from Galway Kinnell, 1980
a note from Galway Kinnell, 1980

I
n 1959 I spent six months in Iran as lecturer at the University of Tehran. Because of my feelings for the country, I arranged to stay on another six months as a journalist, writing a weekly article about Iran for the English-language edition of a Tehran newspaper. In preparing these pieces I wandered about the country quite a lot, sometimes with friends who knew Iran very well, more often alone, and with the five hundred words of Farsi I had managed to acquire, I was able to get along pretty well. The Japanese writer Makoto Oda titled his book about his travels,
I Saw As Much As I Could;
that is what I tried to do while in Iran.

This note is simply to acknowledge the obvious—which is that while I saw as much as I could, alas I wasn't able to see everything. In a regular novel, one expects a description of surface life—which
Black Light
may provide. But one also expects a certain understanding of the social fabric. For me, as a foreigner who spent only a total of twelve months in Iran, it was impossible to know much about the inner workings of that ancient, complex, tradition-ruled, abruptly modernizing country. But I did not intend
Black Light
to be a naturalistic novel; rather I
had in mind to write a book that would be closer to a fable than to a novel and thus could not pretend to depict an actual society.

In preparing the book for re-publication after its first appearance fourteen years ago, I made a great many small revisions throughout. Each revision seemed a matter of style, yet the cumulative effect has been, perhaps, to change perceptibly the entire mood of the book.