"You drifted apart?"

"Not in so many words, but yes."

"And Rumi became your consolation."

"Not exactly. But he was reliable. And reliably uplifting. That was another thing Martine could never get over. 'How can I ever compete with some legendary old man who's been dead for donkeys' years? I'll never be as mysterious as he is. I can't be. He's got seven hundred years on me.' If there were anything she could do, she said, she'd do it. But there wasn't."

"So how can I compete?"

"By giving me something he couldn't. By being yourself."

He'd done it again. Like when he'd leaned in to kiss her goodbye on the beach, or reached for the Song of Songs when he'd only been trying to pass the time. Somehow with her he seemed to have a genius for saying more than he intended and coming out with lines he'd have laughed at in the Cineplex.

She turned her head a little and kissed him now, deeply, imploringly, as if to try to summon up someone deep in hiding. Her hair fell around their cheeks, their mouths, and they were tented in its golden fall.

Then, remembering how quickly she took flight, he pulled back a little. "Maybe we should wait."

"I'm sorry," she said, as if the fault was hers. "It's been a long time since I was intimate with anyone."

The words she used, like the Alice band with which she kept her hair in place, her high-buttoned dress, its whites and pastels-all of it issued a warning more forcibly than anything she said. As if she were a vase only inches behind a velvet curtain. Move one inch too far, and she'd be broken.

And yet her face, when she forgot about herself, was filled with an ancient light and clarity. He thought of the time, as a boy, when his mother had dragged him around the Uffizi in Florence, and he, a typical schoolboy of nine or ten, had yawned conspicuously with each new room, and looked in the other direction. Then they'd come into room 10, the madonnas of Botticelli, and something had caught at him. It wasn't the cackling cherub at the center of each painting; that seemed almost a joke. And yet the girl who cradled him in every picture was almost painfully alive. Half glowing with a mother's pride, half holding back, as if startled by the light with which she'd been entrusted. Half moving towards the Angel Gabriel, to hear what he was whispering; and yet half withdrawing, as if not sure if she wanted this new destiny.

He hadn't known at the time that Botticelli is the obligatory favorite of every romantic schoolboy; hadn't even heard that Simonetta Vespucci's uncle was the one to find America. He'd known nothing about the Angel Gabriel's connection with Mohammed. Yet what he'd seen had been more real than any of that: a girl awakened to a light she hadn't known about, and fearful, disconcerted, now, lest her life would never be the same.

"What are you most afraid of in the world?" she said, and the spell, for the moment, was broken.

"Of losing myself. You?"

"Of losing everything. Being alone."

"Being abandoned, in a way."

"I guess," she said, and then turned away, as if the interlude was over. "Anyway, that's safer than any of the other answers."

In the morning, when he forced himself to the library, she was sleeping. Stretched out, even when he returned in late afternoon, in a happy state of trust. She never slept easily at home, she'd said the night before, the conversation drifting on till dawn, and the two of them, without seeming to intend it, moving from the sofa to the bed. Yet sometimes all she wanted to do was sleep and sleep so she'd never have to look at the life that was waiting for her.

When she heard him come in, she stirred, and opened her eyes.

"You deserted me."

"For a few hours."

"To do what?"

"To surrender." He hadn't expected that.

"To what?" she said, and she pushed the sheets back just a little.

"The usual. My poems."

"Words on the page."

"Why not?"

"Possession is nine-tenths of the love," she said, as if talking to herself, and then he noticed that her face was flushed, and her lips were faintly parted.

"For them," he said. Whatever she needed-whatever he needed- he thought, came at some level deeper than the body.

She looked up at him, clearly piqued that the moment had been lost.

"You never talk about your parents."

"There's not much to say."

"They're in England?"

"They were. Not now."

She looked away. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"You needn't be. I never told you."

"So that's why . . ." and then she stopped herself.

"That's why I'm the center of the Macmillan empire," he said, to bring them up from the deep.

She didn't laugh, though. She looked at him and looked at him, and then looked down, as if she was shaking.

"What is it?"

She shook her head, eyes full. "It's too poignant."

When he returned from the library next day, she was gone.

The darkness came on much earlier now, and soon the first winter storms were slashing through the town: two, three days of agitated skies, the sound of unrelenting rain, and then the streets outside were silent again, and pockets of blue could be seen in the white. Pieces of a broken pot, and the clouds just rimmed with light. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the storm moved on, and he awoke one morning to find the world as sharp as if it had just been slapped awake.

Early winter was the magic time in California, the days acquiring an edge, a form of sharpness, that they never had in the bleary summers. Voices soft and low in the sweatered dark, heat lamps on the terraces at six o'clock and around everything a kind of definition, a startled clarity, that gave the sunny days more meaning. In winter California became an older place, with secrets.

He called her occasionally to try to bring her back, but all he got was the sound of a phone ringing and ringing, now and then a male voice saying shortly, sharply, "This is 437-2962. Talk!" Then, a few days later, three hectic beeps that told him that the tape was now full: no messages could be taken in any case.

"We run from our fears," he wrote, pushing himself back into the papers on his desk, "and so run from the very place where our transformation might be hiding. We wall ourselves in with what we think we know, and then what we don't know, which is what can save us, is left knocking on the door." Then, wondering what he was really writing about, he tried to open the books on the desk to bring himself back to the matter at hand: the fact that Rumi had signed half of his poems with the name "Shams"-the bedraggled stranger he had claimed as his own-and the fact, on top of that, that this was a metaphor as well as an ancient gesture: in Persian, "Shamsuddin" means "Religious Sun."

"Five hundred of his poems, more," he went on, "Rumi ended with the word for silence. As if to say that words or poems can only take you so far, and no farther. At some point you have to cast off from reason, say goodbye to the things you can explain and then . . ."

And as he began to finish the sentence, as seemed to happen every time he was back in his dissertation now, the phone on the desk began to ring.

He let it go unanswered, not eager to come back through the centuries to hear a telemarketer make his sales pitch (or, what seemed little different, to hear a well-meaning classmate talk about a manuscript that had shown up in Herat), and then, as the unknown caller continued to talk-no click-he turned the volume up to see why the intruder was going on so long.

On the machine, the voice he least expected to hear: ". . . the unwarranted intrusion," Sefadhi was saying, "but if I don't hear otherwise from you, I shall expect to see you at six p.m."

He played the whole message back again, the volume higher, and heard what might have been a practical joker, or a trick concocted by some Department prankster: what sounded like his adviser summoning him for an "informal meeting" two days from now, on the beach. So informal that he was fixing a time and place. In all the time they'd worked together, Sefadhi had made it a point never to meet him outside the office; if anything, he'd tried to screen him off from any glimpse of a private life. When, once, one of his graduate students had summoned the courage to ask him about this, he'd just said, in his characteristic way, "Limits are what give meaning to affection."

It sounded so much like a ruse that he wondered what could lie behind it. Was Sefadhi concerned that his most loyal student was running after manuscripts that didn't exist, moving in the opposite direction from his thesis? Or did he have some message to impart, about where real manuscripts might be?

When he arrived at the Beachside Bar on the appointed day, a few minutes before six-Sefadhi was ruthless in such courtesies-the waiter led him out onto the terrace, and he saw his teacher sitting alone at a round table with a white tablecloth on it. As soon as he heard the approaching footsteps, the older man looked around and stood up to greet him, and his slightly informal wear-an open-necked white shirt and sweater-made him look as he seldom did: forlorn.

"What will it be, John?" he said, taking care not to sit down till his student had done so.

"Just a Coke," he said, knowing that his adviser would never drink in public.

Around them it was already dark, and the waiters were stepping from table to table to turn on the heaters. The tables with their white linen, laid out in front of the sea-the islands outlined in the distance, and fading into the dark-looked like a party someone had arranged for friends who would never come. Sefadhi asked him in a desultory way about Seville, who had asked after him, who had not: all the questions he could have asked, and didn't, at their debriefing session. Then, as if casually, he told him a little about what had happened to Uwe while he was away: the Department was still alive with the news of the Dutch student who, six months before the completion of his doctorate on Scientology, had suddenly taken flight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the word had it, his life had begun to turn into a television melodrama. His cat had been found dead on his driveway; his children had been handed notes at the day-care center; someone had even said that he'd gone and done the Witness Protection thing, taking a name from an old gravestone, and living now under another identity in a far-off town.

"They found out about his thesis, I gather."

"Or somebody told them," said Sefadhi, pointedly. "What about you? The manuscripts you were so excited about."

"Not excited now. They don't seem eager to be found."

"No one's been of any help?"

"The opposite. The people who know something seem the last ones to talk."

"And the ones who know nothing talk and talk."

He guessed, from his professor's joke, that he'd given the right answer.

"And if I did find something . . ."

"It would be worse."

"I know. It's better that I don't."

"A complicated field," said Sefadhi, jangling a few nuts from the small white bowl in his palm as he spoke. "I never really told you, I think, about Leila."

"Your first wife?"

"My only wife." A flash of steel behind the curtain. "The reason I'm here. The official reason, at least: SOAS, California, my life in the West"-he contrived to give the last phrase the feeling of inverted commas-"the whole thing."

"She worked here, I think I heard. Or studied here at least."

"Worked, yes. After a fashion. Before I knew her. By the time we met, she was in London, at the embassy."

"A diplomat?"

"In a sense. In London she was first secretary."

It was unclear to him why Sefadhi was saying any of this; the more he said, the less clear it was why he was saying anything at all.

Then, playing with his stirrer, and rubbing his hands together to rid them of the dust of almonds, he said, "What you have before you, John, is that most implausible of figures in your English spy novels, the unsuspecting husband of a spy."

"That can't be."

"Why not? We always had a large presence in London; it was there long before Mossadegh. Many of our people were working covertly. And I, a student, became that unhappiest of cliches, a spy's half-knowing spouse. A funny thing to be, in both senses of your word."

"Everything okay with you gentlemen tonight?"

The waiter was standing at their side-he'd seen that the older man's glass was empty-and Sefadhi, shaken from his story, ordered a second soda water while his student shook his head no. Around them, as the wind blew in from the sea, the waiters were bowing down to try to light a candle on every table.

"As you can imagine, it was not easy. I could ask nothing, I could know nothing. When she was late at the office, when she was called away to an overseas trip; when she went out and didn't come back for three days . . ." The new drinks arrived, and he paused. "Of everything I could know nothing."

When someone entrusts you with a secret-this had been Alex's wisdom, years before-he's trying, as often as not, to keep you from some deeper secret. If someone tells you he's the husband of a spy, it may be a way of keeping you from thinking that he's a spy himself.

"So you never knew anything?"

"Nothing. If she took meetings in a hotel, if she went suddenly to Europe, if she disappeared without a word, I could know nothing. It was nothing dangerous or difficult, she used to tell me, but it was better for me to keep my innocence."

He said nothing, so Sefadhi would continue, but his adviser seemed to need no prompting.

"She could have been enjoying a contact that was 'extracurricular,' in your words. She could have been making deals with Iraq, with Hafez Assad. She could have been reporting on me to the authorities. I never even saw her passport."

"And this went on a long time?"

"I met her in '73. It ended in '79."

"I'm sorry."

"She was called back to Tehran, shortly before the change in government. I never heard from her again."

"You don't even know if she's alive?"

"I know nothing. If I am a married man; if I can take another wife. What happened to her house near the Winter Palace-she used to show me pictures. Her grandparents near the border, the cinema they ran. Nothing. It's better, perhaps. If I knew something, it would be worse. If we had both been in Tehran in '79 . . ." and then his voice trailed off, even his grammar and syntax falling away.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then, feeling that his teacher was waiting for him to draw some conclusion, he said, "There's a virtue in keeping quiet."

"A virtue in remembering what you're up against." Sefadhi sounded like himself now, as if they were back in his office. "These men are not gentlemen."

"Things have consequences, in other words."

"Always. Unintended consequences."

The older man drained his second glass quickly and then called for the bill; when it came, he drew out a black pen with gold trimming, elegant even in this casual meeting. "I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself," he said, as he calculated the tip and signed. "A private consultation between student and teacher."

"Of course."

They got up, and as they began walking out, suddenly the older man slipped, and grabbed onto the tablecloth to keep himself from falling. A glass of water spilled its contents across his sweater.

When he came out into the parking lot, more steady now, it was as if the man so in command of things in the office had been replaced by someone more faltering, more poignant; someone not sure of what part he was meant to play. "Next time, our usual place, our usual hour," said Sefadhi, collecting himself as he went over to his car. As he unlocked the door, the older man seemed to be shivering a little in the winter night.