When I was a child, there were nights I would startle out of sleep and, in the stillness that followed, would listen to the entire house and become convinced that a flood was slowly filling the room. I heard wavelets beneath my sister’s breathing. The only remedy for it was to climb into her bed and fall asleep in her arms, and our mother would scold us when she found us the next morning in our hopeless tangle with cold feet protruding from the bedcovers.
Vera and I were both outsiders who never overcame our odd and lonely upbringing or foreign accent and manner in that remote Italian hill town, and for many years we were each other’s solitary playmates. Vera tied her lavish long hair back with a velvet ribbon so she could take part in my projects of rooting through brambles and bracken, and accompanied me wherever I roamed. She reassured herself with the knowledge that I had to look after her and she had to look after me. Remaining in a room once I had left it seemed to her meaningless. Once the Count took to dropping by our bedroom to chat we used for our secret conferences the kitchen’s larder cupboard, which afforded space for two people if they stood without lifting their elbows. She sympathized with my desire to leave but said it was only permissible if I took her with me. While I studied and waited she chided me for brooding too much and being ungrateful for those blessings we enjoyed. One rainy March afternoon she noted I’d been peering out our window for an hour, and wanted to know at what I’d been gazing. It then occurred to me that I’d been looking at a hedge, and that a hedge was not enough at which to have been staring for so long.
We agreed on the necessity of understanding others’ affections not as fixed commitments but rather as ever-changing seas, with their tides coming and going. This was of considerable service after the Count’s proposal and our mother’s response. He repeated his proposal some months later on the occasion of Vera’s seventeenth birthday, and the previous week news had arrived that I’d be matriculating at Bedford College, London, a real school at last after all of my scuttering. Our father had agreed to pay the tuition. He himself had resolved to move to England.
Vera had been without words in my presence for a day and a half following this development, and then had slipped into my bed in the wee hours of the morning.
“See?” I whispered to her. “You do love your sister.”
“Put your arms around me,” she whispered back. Her nightgown’s periwinkle was indigo in the darkness.
“Not without a declaration of love,” I told her, and when she started to weep I gently teased, “Well, why else are you here?”
She turned so that her back was to my front and my arms could more easily encircle her. “Because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” she finally whispered.
We awoke to a predawn aurora in the east and the cheerless and clanking procession of a small tribe descending to its winter valley. Ismail offered our greetings and informed me in a low voice that these were people of the Qazvin. The men must have gone ahead previous. There were at most fifty or sixty elders, women, and children, and even so they occupied over an hour in moving past. I went unnoticed in the low light due to the plainness of my chador and the extent of their fatigue. Mules and the occasional small ox were overhung with any number of carpets, cooking pots, poultry baskets, and tent cloths, all crisscrossed with ropes as if lashed to the frames in a windstorm. Mothers carried children on their backs. Stragglers fell out of the column and regained their feet and wavered back into it. Watching the pace they set, I began to understand why two years earlier the Lurs, when fleeing a forced resettlement, had massacred their own families to unburden themselves for the march.
After nine days’ advance we were still continuing to climb, the track at times becoming so steep it was impracticable for our heavy-laden mules. We were being taken up into the joyful loneliness of the summits. Ismail’s mood continued to deteriorate, and at day’s end he would squat, lost in a meadow of resignation, while Aziz and I erected our poor camp. He might answer an inquiry about dinner with the comment that we still possessed some flour, and he responded to complaints by invoking the majesty of God and wondering how he was expected to produce sustenance in an uninhabited land. One evening apropos of nothing he remarked that it was no wonder England was a mighty nation, since its women did what Persian men feared to attempt.
We entered a great canyon and persisted in our ascent while crossing and recrossing a stream tumbling down past us. Maidenhair ferns provided a welcome green. Fish in pools at intervals swirled their wide, transparent tails. The water was altogether sweet but Ismail insisted it was known as the Eye of Bitterness. We rode until trees appeared on the high skylines of the ridges and began to spread down the slopes. We passed broom and tamarisk and terebinth, the last bearing blue berries that proved delicious.
We rode until we topped a windswept ridge of sufficient elevation that we could see for twenty miles, and there we made camp. There in that buffeting cold we looked out on Alamut country below and experienced the satisfaction of being able to glimpse, after all we had traversed, proof that the Grail of our imaginations now belonged to the tangible world.
Even as a child I had realized that in the realm of one’s family, there was a weight and a drag to all things, but that even so I could walk from morning until nightfall and feel only a pleasant faint trembling in my legs at day’s end. Upon receipt of one of my mother’s or Vera’s letters I might walk from Hyde Park to Deptford Wharf and, while walking, compose my responses. I told them about my revered new professor, William Paton Ker, who was already opening innumerable doors to me, and I conveyed my elation with the country’s appetite for discoveries of every stripe: Gertrude Bell had ventured among the Jebel Druze and had reported seeing them devour their sheep raw. When Vera asked if I found Bell’s success disheartening, I wrote back that the woman traveled with enough companionship and equipment for a supper club, with her dining tables and mosquito nets, and that she visited only well-charted areas, which differences would clearly distinguish my achievement from hers.
My sister asked if she might come visit, and I told her that she would always be welcome, though I had neither funds with which to entertain her nor place in which to put her. She pointed out that in roughing it she was at least my equal and offered to sleep on the floor beneath my bed. My housemistress, I observed, would be implacably unhappy with an arrangement such as this.
In subsequent letters she asked if I’d been so very discontented in Italy and if living alone had brought me any more fulfillment. I answered that the discontented were the least capable of living with only themselves, since the same goad that drove them to isolation would spoil their solitude as well. The true traveler left not to renounce but to seek. And while to be given a cold bath was not a merit in itself, to take one voluntarily might be.
A month later my mother wrote that my sister had accepted the Count’s proposal, and that Vera was sorrowful she would not be able to realize her dream of a wedding in England. My mother’s tone was brisk. For the first time she referred to the Count as Mario. My sister herself wrote that she hoped to become a good friend to him, but also that she felt she’d wasted years in just learning how to live, knowledge that now was going to be locked away. She noted, apropos of another breakdown, that she was so wretched it pleased her to make everyone else wretched as well. And that what attractiveness she ever possessed had deserted her, and that I was now the beautiful one. And I’m disconcerted still by the potency of the thrill I experienced at my escape, amid all of my misery on her behalf. She wrote that our mother had taken her to Venice on holiday, and I read and reread the letter and castigated myself during my circumnavigations of the city, because this was how competitive I could be: once, at the age of eight, when my father had beaten me at chess, I became so enraged that I buried his white queen in the garden.