Black Light (6 page)
Authors: Galway Kinnell
W
hen 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 ruinsâruins 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.
Jamshid rolled up the torn carpet, made a sling for it of straps from Hassan's harness, and hoisted it on his shoulder. He paused a moment. He looked up into the sky. Nothing was visible in the glittering air. He knew that in
that blueness lived the changed flesh and blood of Hassan. Those strange, bobbing, rubbery motions of the camel had been, all the time, a way of trying to become winged.
Jamshid stumbled down the rock hillside and entered the field of ruins. A huge stone animal, half lion, half dragon, looked over the plains. Jamshid circled it and saw that its body had fallen off and lay slain on the sand. He climbed a staircase; beside him ascended a panel of climbing men carved in relief, each wearing a different costume, each bearing a different gift, a panel depicting the entire known world coming here to render homage. At the top, where these emissaries should have laid down their gifts and knelt in fealty, was nothing now but the emptiness. Jamshid saw a great stone slab set up high in the air bearing a scene in relief: under the protection of a man carrying an umbrella and another carrying a fly swatter, the king was on his morning walk. Where his head should have been was only broken stone. Jamshid kicked at a stone or two on the ground to see if he could turn up the face. He passed through a doorway; he could as easily have passed through the wall. He reached the highest elevation of the ruined field. On stone slabs he saw writing in the square script of the foreigners. He wondered what urgent messages they had chosen to record.
Dusk fell. Jamshid decided to sleep where he was. He did not spread out the carpet. It didn't matter to him that he lay directly on the earth. But as he lay there he felt the strangeness of this material under his handsâan earth made of stones that had been grated, rained, blown, and burnt into a substance that was hardly earth at all, but a form of disappearance, a substance into which one of the world's great empires had gone away. As if death had been ground up and strewn here in a thick layer. He saw the
jagged, unburdened columns rising in the darkness and the great stones with their heavy, closed eyes.
He lay a long time hearing the noise before he started listening to it. It was an eerie, anguished crying, half a scream, half a wail, as if some being in the ruins were keening for all things. It was the most anguished sound he had ever heard. As he lay listening he thought he heard in it also a kind of ecstasy.
The sound grew nearer. Though the moon had not yet risen, he now could make out in the darkness a human figure moving among the stones and columns. The wail broke out again. It occurred to him that whoever it was staggering through the night was grieving for one particular lost thing. For anything at all perhaps, as long as it was
one
thing.
“What is it, woman?” Jamshid said. “Why do you wail?”
Continuing to stagger toward him the figure cried in response, “My son! My son! I have lost my son!” She came closer. “If you are a Moslem you will help me!” Jamshid could see her face. Her eyes were shining with tears, her mouth was large with crying.
“Tell me,” he said, coming up beside her and putting a hand on her arm, “what has happened to your son?” She turned and looked at him and kept on wailing.
Was it the bad light, here in the darkness, Jamshid thought, that produced the look of sexual passion in her face? But he heard it in the wail itself. She put her arms around Jamshid. Strangers, they stood clinging to each other under the faceless king. Her own face shone ivory in the starlight, her eyes glittered. Continuing to hold each other, they sank to the ground.
“What happened to your son?” Jamshid asked, as much to distract himself from his need for her as to find out.
She only kept wailing, “My son! My son!”, though more calmly now. At last the wails passed into whispers; at last the whispers turned into deep-taken breaths, and the woman fell asleep in Jamshid's arms. Jamshid himself slept little, dreaming intense sexual longings, experiencing them again whenever he woke.
The earth on which they lay was glistening, though the moon had not yet risen. He took some in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It shone and sparkled, and seemed to have something in it of the iridescence of certain feathers.
In the morning she was gone. There were great wings of light in the east. From far off he heard a rustle and splashing, and a hollow, fluting music. He got up and followed the sound. At the edge of the ruins he came to a wide, shallow well. When he lowered his bucket many doves, which had been bathing, burst into the air. He drank in long gulps. He took off his clothes and poured cold water all over him.
He came to a little mud house where some peasants were sitting in the shade and inquired of the road to Shiraz.
“That is the very road.”
As Jamshid walked down the Shiraz road, he heard a car approaching. He stopped and faced it and signaled that he wanted a ride. It was big and shiny and two foreigners sat in the back seat. One pointed at him and they seemed to be laughing. For a long time Jamshid could see the car's dust proceeding across the Mardasht plains, and hear its motor.
Later in the day a melon truck came along. Jamshid hailed it and it stopped. Beside the driver sat the driver's wife and children. “Get in the back,” the driver said. “You may sit on the melons but take care you don't step on them.”
Jamshid climbed on top of the truckload of green and white striped melons, and the truck set off. He felt around for a ripe one and broke it in pieces on the railing of the truck. In dripping handfuls he devoured it as he rode into the wind and across plains that were, suddenly, green and fertile.
I
n Shiraz Jamshid washed the melon juice from his hands at a public tap, and made his way to the tomb of Hafez, near which he hoped to find Ali's house. All he could do was tell Ali's widow of the old man's death, and the whereabouts of his remains.
As for Hafez' remains, these lay in a garden of quiet green pools, and ancient cypresses and dogwood trees. In the center of the garden, under a little canopy set on eight columns, was the coffin. It was made of stone and on its sides verses were cut. Jamshid wondered what they might say and wished now that he had learned to read. Everywhere were flowers and their reflections. No wonder, thought Jamshid, Ali had wanted to be buried in Shiraz. Here death seemed to be unblurred by darkness or pain. After ordinary life, it was like a step forward.
As he stood at the coffin Jamshid noticed a yellow-faced old man beside him. Touching the coffin with one hand, the man seemed to be praying. Tears splashed from his closed eyes. From his pocket he drew out a volume of Hafez' poems, opened it, and put down his finger. Jamshid saw the yellow face expand in a smile.
“Listen,” the man said, turning to Jamshid, “hear what Hafez has said to me: âTime stops not, take the Rose of Love in your arms.' How is that for advice? Ah, Hafez. . . . It seems that he knows us, each of us, so well . . .”
“But, old man,” said Jamshid, for the man appeared to be close to a hundred, “what on earth can you do with advice like this, which is more fit for a boy of twenty?”
Jamshid had only meant to be sensible but he saw he had offended the yellow-faced man. “What do you know of a man?” the fellow said. “At half my age you are already wizened. Look how pathetic and skinny you are.” He rattled Jamshid's shoulder. “You think you can tell me what a man can do or cannot do. You look to me as if you've never seen the Rose of Love at all . . .”
Jamshid was only too aware that, as far as he was concerned, the Rose of Love had never so much as blossomed but only budded and died. He started to defend himself. “Why just last night, by the dark of the moon . . .” But his long life mostly without love came back to him, and he tasted ashes. He was wizened and disgusting. So he would be until death, so he had been since birth. Or at least since he had turned back from that adventure outward with Varoosh. And there was no point in saying âuntil death': in all important respects he had already died. “Never mind, old man,” Jamshid said, “I am sorry for what I said.”
“Now,” the old man went on, placated at once, “let us see what the poet has to say to you.” He held out the book. “Just open the book where it opens, and put down your finger where it puts itself down.” The old man studied the line on which Jamshid's finger had touched down. “For you,” he said, “the augury is this: âWho is it comes dancing on the grave?' He studied the phrase and nodded his head. “A deep saying,” was all the exegesis he offered.
Poets of mystical inclination irritated Jamshid, because they gave the impression of high significance and yet kept hidden exactly what it was. This incomprehensible question irritated him now. Why did he have to get a question anyway, instead of straightforward advice? The old man, who would have been content with any utterance, the cloudier the better, was given an unequivocal prescription that a fool could see was preposterous. That, Jamshid reflected, is the way with poetry. When it is incomprehensible it strikes you as profound, and when you do understand it, it lacks common sense.
The flush of poetic pleasure still showed in the old man's eyes. It embarrassed Jamshid, and he decided he had better go about his business of locating Ali's widow. He asked the old man if he knew the neighborhood.
“I do,” the man said. “I live nearby and stroll over here every evening to get my augury. I have done so for as long as I can remember. By now I have received nearly every one in the book. Every night it comes true. But yours . . . I have never known anyone to have received that one. A very deep saying . . .”
The old man sensed Jamshid's impatience and got back to the point. “I live over there. Where that palm grows up out of a garden. Will you come and eat with me? I am a poor old man and have not much to offer. But I think you are poorer still and will not object.”
Jamshid protested only a little, for it did seem to him this was the wrong time to call on Ali's widow. To show up just at dinner time was certainly impolite. Furthermore the poor woman might have no heart for cooking, on hearing the news. And Jamshid had never been hungrier. Protesting a few times more, according to custom, he went along.
In the twilight, under the date palm, they ate melons, pomegranates, rice, mutton, eggplants, and curd-water. Then they smoked the waterpipe. It made a loud purring noise in the garden. Finally the old man got to his feet.
“Now for our auguries to come true. Wait,” he said, “I will be back directly.”
chapter thirteen
chapter thirteen
T
he old man came out of the house carrying an opium pipe. When the pipe had heated up in the fire, he cut a morsel of opium, yellow-brown as his face, and pressed it to the bowl. Holding a red-hot piece of charcoal to it, he blew down the pipe until the coal turned white hot in the jet of air and started the opium burning. It crackled and hissed as he sucked its smoke deep into his lungs.
He handed the pipe to Jamshid. “To help you find the meaning of your augury.”
“Do you feel anything?” the old man asked. Jamshid only tasted burnt smoke, the almost cloying richness of something dank and moldy that suddenly dries out by burning. Jamshid thought of the poppies, their waxen blooms in the fields, made for the eye. He could see their sap flowing by night from their wounds, to be breathed into a man's blood, in some garden of flowing water and roses.
“I am feeling the blessing of opium,” the old man said, preparing himself a fourth pipe. “All day I miss the blessing. All day I am dead for lack of it. But every evening I come back to life. The blessing is the relief of no longer
being dead. If only I could be dead and not know it. I used to wish I never took up smoking. Now I am very old, and to wish would be unseemly. Look at how these hands jump and tremble. Never mind . . .” He sighed and handed the pipe to Jamshid. “My only regret now is the price you've got to pay for decent opium . . .”
“Never mind,” he repeated, “I am alive again. That is all that matters. Smoke your pipe. An old man, who has been dead many times, tells you this. To be alive is all that matters.”
Jamshid sucked in the smoke, holding it a long time in his lungs, not letting one wisp escape until he had got the best of it.
“Do you know why I brought you to my house tonight?” the old man continued. Jamshid shook his head. “Because when I saw you standing at the tomb I knew you were a dead man.”
“Will opium bring me back to life?”
“No, I don't think it will,” the old man said. “It brings me alive, it's true, but that is because it is what I died of. I don't know what you died of. Whatever it was, that is what will bring you alive again. However, smoking will tell you what it is to live. It will show you a picture of yourself fully alive. What do you feel now?”
Jamshid put down the pipe. He was a little abashed to answer.
“I think of my wife,” he said.
“Ah!” the old man replied, “It is like that the first few times. But later . . . And is she a good woman?”
“A good woman? . . .” Jamshid muttered. Suddenly he saw his wife's black eyes with little lights in them in the darkness, the night of their wedding. It was like remembering what he had never perceivedâa look containing some shuddering, animal mystery.
“She was young. To me, she was beautiful,” he said. “She was obedient, and also disobedient. She was graceful and her eyes were black. I mourned for her but perhaps I never truly missed her until just now.”
“She is dead?”
“She is long dead.”
“Marry again,” the old man said. “I can guess now at the sense of your augury. You died on account of love, and love has to bring you back again. You must dance on your grave.”
Jamshid smiled. He felt an affection for the old opium smoker. He was discovering there were possibilities of friendship in the world. For the first time he found himself wanting not to be caught. “To live is all that matters.” He thought that it might be true.
“There is someone I must find,” he said. “An old woman who lives hereabouts. Maybe you know her. She is the wifeâthe widowâof an old man named AliâAli of the Good Earsâa great man who has been gone from Shiraz many years, traveling about with camels . . .”
“Ah, Ali the murderer,” the old man said. “Yes, I knew him well. I am truly sorry he is dead. His wife lives just two houses away. I will go and tell her you are here. In the last few weeks she had said more than once she expected to have news of him. I am sorry for her that it will be bad news, but to tell the truth she has been living with the ghost of that old man for too long. Tell me how he died.” The old man smoked a fresh pipe as he listened to the story.
“His death was like him,” he said when Jamshid had finished. “He was the noblest murderer of his day. He used to be a looti in the days before there were policemen. He kept it up even after the policemen came, because none of us around here could really trust a policeman to protect us.
“Ali was everything a looti should be. He was brave, manly and patient and kept his promises. He was pure and single-minded. He didn't oppress the weak or commit extortion against anyone. He drove evil away from anybody who was oppressed. He spoke the truth and listened to it. He gave out justice even against himself, and never hurt anybody whose salt he had eaten. Hypocrisy to him was shameful, and he didn't worry about calamity.
“Well, one winter everyone in the quarter was getting sick, and a little boy died. At last it was discovered the baker had been putting poisoned corn in his bread in order to save money. Ali went to the baker's shop and was about to throw the baker into the oven, according to custom. The baker was screaming and wriggling, for Ali had the wretch poised at the fiery door. Just then a policeman rushed in and struck Ali across the cheek with a club. Ali understood a new order was coming, and if the policeman hadn't struck him, I believe he would have let him rescue the baker. But having been struck, Ali dropped the baker and struck the policeman on the head. The policeman died on the spot. I found him just standing there. He would have waited until the rest of the police had got up their nerve and come for him. But I told him he must go. His wife, who was only a little girl then, said she would wait for him as long as it might be. Once in a while, every few years or so, he came back, but it was no good. He was too famous. One dead policeman never blows over. Wait here,” the old man said, getting up, “I will go and tell Ali's wife that his friend has come bringing news.”
Left alone Jamshid began to feel strange from the opium. Any scene his senses fixed on became immobile. “Who is it comes dancing on the grave?” He sat in the lamplit garden gazing at a rose which, head bent against
the wall, clasped itself. Inside the rose a fly lay motionless in sleep. The lamp put shadows on the mud wall. The wall was not a surface but a depth across which moved living, glorious forms. Jamshid smelled the sharp, desolating smell of dried mud. A palm tree rose up horny as a snake. At the top huge orange sprays of dates lunged downward again, and dark, sword-like leaves clashed slowly in the sky. The dark odor of the dates floated down. The pool of water shifted a little and then heaved.
“She is still awake,” the old man said, coming back into the garden. Jamshid heard the voice very dimly. He had to shake his head to free himself. “She asks that you go to her. At this very minute she is preparing tea for you. Go. Her house is two doors away.”
Jamshid took up his carpet. As he closed the gate behind him it was like closing a door on a world of signs, the sign the book had given him and those woven into the garden itself all telling him to go.
