"Kristina's the one who handles his legacy, then?"

"I guess. She was always the one who did his errands for him, went back and forth."

"Khalil and so on?"

"I guess. They never told me much. But I know my father still had lots of friends over there, especially within the Shia community."

Suddenly the foreign words came out, which for all this time she'd been so eager to keep away from him.

"And Sefadhi, too, must have been one of your father's contacts?"

"Your adviser?" she said, and the pretense of innocence was so unconvincing, he realized it would be useless to ask more.

"I just felt"-he sipped at his beer-"or assumed, really, that that's how you got the manuscript."

"The manuscript's different."

Suddenly she seemed deeply interested in her rice.

"You've got to tell me something, Camel, if we're going to take a trip together."

"The manuscript belongs to me. That's all you need to know. My mother doesn't know about it, Kristina doesn't know about it. It's mine, and I gave it to you."

He sipped his beer so she'd go on, but she seemed to have said her piece. The three men came to the climax of "Guantanamera"-the day's last high note-and two teenagers in stained white shirts came out to begin stacking chairs.

"I don't have a clue what the manuscript means, or even what it is. It's beautiful, but I can't work out its context."

"You don't get it, do you?" she said, looking at him as if she could hardly believe he could be so slow. "You understand why I gave it to you, don't you?" Now that it was agreed she'd be coming, she didn't have to be careful with him any more.

"I think I do."

"It's not as if I can afford a wedding ring."

He looked down; somehow, with her, he'd always been worse than foolish.

"It's not as if I expect wedding bells, you know."

The place was closing around them, and they walked out into the dark.

V.

There is a secret flight from Los Angeles to Tehran, across borders that are technically closed, to places that are officially unreachable. If you know how to work out the routings correctly, if you know how to read the papers in the right way, you can go to the Alitalia counter on a certain day, at a certain time, and there, above the check-in desk, is a small sign, no larger than a license plate, that says "TEHRAN, via Roma."

There were people all around them when they arrived, banging large bags against their legs, moving in a cloud of Guerlain and Dior. Head scarves and tight jeans and excited teenagers carrying televisions or generators back to their loved ones at home. Around the huge departure hall (a mosque in reverse, he thought, looking at its large empty spaces), the mujahedin in their pressed suits were going from one startled group to another, showing them photographs of what the Second Revolution had wrought: the battered faces of dissidents, medieval instruments of torture.

He looked quickly to see how she was taking it in, and he saw apprehension, confusion, wariness; but also, what he hadn't expected, hope. Her eyes were bright as she took her boarding pass from the woman behind the desk, and she moved more briskly than she ever did at home, as if on her way at last to one of the adventures she'd been reading of. When she asked him how Sefadhi had procured the visas so quickly-a "friend of a friend," of course, in the Interests Section in Washington-he took care not to tell her how his final meeting with his adviser had gone.

"Is there anything I can bring back for you?" he'd asked his teacher, coming to collect the documents from his office.

"From Iran?" said Sefadhi. "What is there to bring back from Iran?"

Their connecting flight, when they arrived at Rome, was delayed for two days-some unspecified problem at Mehrabad-so they went into the city and caught the train to Venice. When they came out on the quay beside the Grand Canal, in the bright winter sunshine, Death suddenly loomed before them, shouting something out, and then danced away. Satan was by his side, sticking out his tongue at a Frenchwoman in thick furs. On the water, groups of harlequins were racing by, jumping up and down and calling out to visitors, and a Pierrot in the prow of a boat reached his hand under the skirts of what looked to be a courtesan. They'd wandered, without meaning to, into Carnevale.

It was Kevin's thesis, and his own, all brought to vivid life (a woman in a gold gown sailed past, stately as a queen, a small gold mask held up to hide her eyes): the pagan, animist spirit that hides out inside even the most modern of places. But it was something else, too, more unsettling. Everything you know about us is wrong, the Lenten costumes said. Underneath what you see is another layer, and underneath that, still another.

They made their way to St. Mark's, turned down a small alleyway where he'd been told a Moslem building still hid out, and as they did, a skeleton lurched up to her, leered, and said something unintelligible before vanishing again. On every side of them, women in black and scarlet costumes, outlandish, and jesters, zanies, figures from a devil's medieval banquet. At Halloween, he thought, we play at being monsters for a night; here the characters seemed to suggest that we are in fact monsters who play at being human.

They walked along thin lanes, over arched bridges in the hesitant light, their breath coming up to greet them and halo them in the cold, and as they walked they passed groups of contemplative birds, a man whose face was chalky white. Dante was over here, talking to some ghost, and Casanova over there, arm in arm with what might have been Beatrice (or a secretary, in her waking hours). After dark, they went to a far corner of the city-someone had slipped a flyer into her hands, and when they'd opened it up, they'd found not the advertisement they'd expected, but directions to what seemed to be a private party. But when they got to the house marked with a scowling face, there was no number on the door, no sign. He knocked, and there was no answer.

She pushed at the door, and it gave, and they were inside a dark, narrow corridor-close and hot-with phantoms, clowns, and courtiers pushing in on them from every side, everyone turned inside out, as if they had become all that they dreamed of becoming-all that they feared to become-the other fifty-one weeks of the year. A demon was crouching in one corner, where a woman was laughing huskily, the larger woman above her dressed so you could see nothing of her but her breasts. The bodies pressed in on one another in the crowded space, intimate, suffocating, warm, and there was an overpowering smell of wine, perfume, something else.

They passed into another room and saw, at its far end, in the near dark, a skull above a door. "Follow the skull," whispered a voice who must have guessed they were foreign from their costumes. "Always follow the skull." They did so-she leading him now (strangely invulnerable in her cat-faced mask, and the long black cloak they'd rented from the sad man in the shop that afternoon)-and inside this farther space there was virtually no light. Men became women, became men again; a character who seemed to have stepped out of one of the Bosch canvases they'd seen at the Duomo came and planted a kiss on her cat's mouth, then reached for him. A man all in black handed her a card, and she said, "Come on. Let's go farther."

When they got to the next room, pitch-black, someone snatched her away from him, and he was alone in a crush of shapes and moans. From every side could be heard gasps of some kind (was that her?), and mutterings, unclaspings. A hand reached for his belt, began to untether it; someone else was breathing on his neck, and moving up towards his ear. He heard a sigh-it could have been her-and then the hands were creeping up under his shirt, reaching for his wallet, and he broke away (there was a curse), and flung himself back into the previous room, the one before that, out again into the corridor, where King Ludwig was peering down the dress of a woman whose face was deathly white.

Then out again, past the last few figures, into the dark, where he leaned down, hands on knees, to catch his breath in the cold. A cat was waiting for him in the dark, and she took his hand and led him back down the long silent lane, past the locked doors, towards the center of town.

"It's almost like we're walking through your poems," she said, softly, for they were lost, and they felt like intruders at a private show.

"I don't think so," he said, still rattled from the party. A couple was under lamplight, circling around each other in the brief light. There was the sound of heavy drapery falling away from somewhere, a sharply taken breath. "It's not higher selves, just different ones."

The dervishes in Los Angeles-he didn't need to remind her-hadn't needed costumes to make themselves something different.

When they got to St. Mark's again, they found a warm spot in one corner-the fellowship didn't extend to a hotel room in Venice-and sat amidst the debris. An hour or so later, the sun began at last to come up above the canal, and they saw figures emerging out of doorways, or stepping out from boats, like actors coming out to take their final bows at the end of an all-night performance. One or two were dressed as Moslem holy men, or Moors from centuries before.

They took a boat back to the station-the colonnades of St. Mark's echoing and empty-and as they went along the canal, saw figures in wigs, women with moles painted on their cheeks, laughing and kissing passionately, while a man in black sat at the back of a lonely boat as if being led across the Styx on the last journey he'd ever take. On the station platform again-tourists in thick sweaters hugging themselves against the chill-he looked back at the shivering reflections in the water, and wondered how it could ever become something different.

"What do you think it'll be like a week from now?"

"More confetti on the square."

"We move on and on, in search of mystery," he wrote on the plane, while she slept, "and then we come to see that the only mysteries we want are the ones we'll never solve. And all we can do is try to cage with reasons what we know to be beyond the scope of reason. Till at last we surrender to something beyond us, and become unknowable ourselves."

It was pure madness, a part of him knew, all the more so since his thesis had been not so much completed as abandoned.

As the pilot made his announcement of their imminent arrival, she stirred, and he followed her gaze out to what seemed to be utter darkness, broken by the great lights of a building they recognized as the Khomeini shrine. Beyond it, the fainter lights of the city going on and on till they ended in emptiness again, and darkness. "It really is a desert," she said, marveling, as if she'd never believed it until now. "Like L.A. Except the lights are all turned out in parts."

When they stepped out of the terminal-the scowling guards having waved them through-the winter cold slapped them in the face, and as they lurched towards the center of the city, and the mountains to the north, the taxi driver said that it was only truly Nowruz, New Year, when the snow had melted on the slopes. The hotel that was waiting for them was bare and cold-heating another of the luxuries apparently banned by the Revolution-and as soon as the door was locked behind them, he jumped into her bed for warmth. For superstition's sake, they'd taken two beds instead of one.

Out in the street the next day, the cars coughing on all sides-the Shah's most audible legacy-he had the sense of being lost inside a maze. Belching trucks and constant horns, and over everything a sense of grime, or chaos, as if the city itself were wearing old black clothes that hadn't been cleaned in years; and deeper than the disorder, a sense of constant apprehension. The people around them were all dressed in brown or black, as if to mock the comparisons with Los Angeles, and he thought of the men he'd seen in Damascus, their fraying shirts and moth-eaten jackets giving a poignancy to their talk of revolution.

"I don't think you're going to find what you're looking for," she said, and he realized she wasn't talking only of taxis; it was impossible to find anything in the town, and even the mountains by which they'd been told they could orient themselves were often hard to make out in the smog, brown over black over brown.

"Even not to find something might be something," he said, and she looked back at him strangely, though not without affection.

As they waited and waited for a car, a woman came up to them, and said something to her in a Farsi so colloquial he couldn't make it out. Then another woman, as if emboldened, came up and handed her an orange. A few children came over to inspect the aliens, and a third woman, eager perhaps to show off her English, came and started asking them questions, or translating the questions of the others. "How long have you been married? How many children do you have? Why do you come here?"

He gave them answers, as the official leader of the party, but the women were mostly looking at her, smiling or gesturing as if to make some contact. An old lady stopped and plucked at the fabric of her coat, as if to remark on its quality. Another one motioned at her scarf, as if to say they were all in this together.

She smiled at them, gestured back, and when they were back at last in the hotel, she said, "It's like the black-and-white Los Angeles." The perfect way to put it, he realized; and they like those beings who long to step into a black-and-white movie, as if that is the way to step into simplicity or purity, or something innocent they've lost.

The next day, a Friday, the day of prayer, they went up into the mountains, as did half Tehran, it seemed, and soon the downtown area was a brown smudge in the distance. It was sunny still-pale, thin winter sun-and the people around them streamed past the tea-houses as if to put behind them the imported chaos of the modern city: the coughing cars, the running gullies, the kids lighting fires in the streets. Here whole families were sharing food-Persia the country that had invented the picnic-and couples took themselves off into the shadows, or sipped shyly at orange Fantas under trees.

They stopped for tea, and he looked at her as she drank-her dark face-scarf, her black pants, the dark coat she wore over everything, for concealment-and realized that she'd neutered herself in a way, and covered up all that she usually showed in public. And yet, in the same breath, she'd recovered a kind of light. The winter brought color to her cheeks, and some layer of complication that she usually wore was gone. A part of her was the rosy-cheeked schoolgirl in Scandinavia she might have been years before.

"You look well," she said, as if reading his thoughts.

"You, too. This place agrees with you."

"I never thought . . ."

He said nothing, so she'd get the thought out.

"I guess"-she paused again-"I guess I never thought it would be so rich. The poverty I expected. The dirt and the chaos, all the bad stuff. But I didn't expect all this." In the streets, the previous day, it had been she who had pointed out to him, with a smile, the sign that said, "DEATH TO AMERICA": the only sign she'd admit to being able to read.

As they went back towards the hotel, they found themselves in one of the gracious, tree-lined streets which the regime had not yet managed to turn into high-rise buildings or mosques.

"He must have grown up somewhere like this," she said, and then said nothing more. The next morning, they were in the desert again- a great brown emptiness for as far as they could see, with nothing to relieve it, as they drove towards the south, but the glittering golden domes where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini-"the soul and voice of God," as his name meant-now slept.

He'd had the feeling, ever since he'd come back from Damascus, that whatever he would find in the context of his manuscripts, he would find in Isfahan; and the intuition had been strengthened when he had remembered that it was the city where Sefadhi had studied (and, he thought now, the city that had roused her to rage on the rainy night in the abandoned house). The imperial capital announced itself with a sudden blaze of blue, visible from far across the desert, after miles and miles of scrubby grass and blankness. Turquoise, lapis, aquamarine-a great shine of color in the winter sun that looked like an oasis of extravagance.

They took a room in a small travelers' inn near the river, and began to take the measure of a town that felt relaxed, itself, in a way that Tehran, the modern capital, could never be. Couples were drinking tea under the famous bridges, and groups of students were walking along the river, laughing and pushing one another as they did. The center of the city was not some grey building that changed name with every change in government; it was the great mosque made of holy verses, its blue impenitent. "It's more like Persia here," he said, and she began to say something and then held back. He looked at her and realized she was moved, in some part of herself; it wasn't anything like what she'd imagined.

"It's still Iran," she said, as they passed a group of boys who stood against the wall watching them as they passed; the city remained a Hizbollahi stronghold, and some of the boys who looked like college students were the same ones who, on ayatollahs' orders, picked off journalists on motorbikes, or placed bombs on the doorsteps of maverick professors. Yet here, too, as in the capital, women and children came up to them everywhere they went, offering small presents. "How many children do you have? What sport do you practice? What do you think of Iran?" An old woman stopped in front of her, eyes so moist it looked as if she would cry, and handed the strange woman from the far-off, rich country a bag of sunflower seeds.

They were going back to the hotel to rest when they passed a gang of small boys on a bridge, pretending, not very successfully, to look away from them. She stopped, and suddenly, impulsively, bent down and gestured towards one of the smallest boys. He looked away, not happy to be approached by a foreigner (and a foreign woman, at that, with a strange-looking instrument in her hands). But finally his curiosity got the better of him, and he stepped forward a little, to see what it was she was carrying.

She showed him with gestures how to push the pink button, and then they stood before him with a smile. The boy focused, clicked, and handed the camera back to her, delighted.

"You see?" she said. "They're just like children anywhere."

They hadn't come only for sightseeing, of course-or told themselves they hadn't-and when they stopped at a cafe for tea, he said, "I don't really expect to find anything." She smiled, as if she knew that his saying so meant he did. The poems that he carried round with him everywhere here, in spite of the risk they represented, were growing more creased every time he pulled them out, and soon, they both knew, they would be torn, and lost entirely (photocopying secret poems did not seem a good idea in Revolutionary Iran). He took them out now, and put them back again, as if not to hex the enterprise with his hopes.

Back in the hotel, she said she wanted to sleep; the desk clerk had nodded his greetings at them as if still impressed that this foreign woman, explaining why she had a different name from her husband, said she kept her mother's name as a gesture of respect. She was tired, he realized-all the years of waiting, the seasons of looking through catalogues, the stresses of the last few weeks accumulating. But she was also telling him silently to go off in search of what he needed without worrying about her.

He took off in the direction of the synagogue, and, once there, began to see if he could find somebody who could speak English (he would never get out what he had to in Farsi). But the Jews who lived in Iran had kept alive only by living quietly, among themselves; the last thing they needed was to jeopardize their security by tending to the trivial concerns of a foreigner. Nearby, at the Church of St. Luke, he couldn't even find a person to answer the bell. "Hello?" he called out. "Anybody home?" but there was nothing, no sign of movement.

He began walking back to the room, defeated, and then, passing a library, he had an idea. Years ago, at a conference, someone had told him that they kept lists of the Revolutionary faithful in the libraries, as a public gesture of gratitude (and, too often, as a secular reward for their martyrdom). He went into the place, nodded at the man behind the desk-he'd deliberately dressed down for the trip and not bothered to shave-and then went to the back, where they seemed to keep public records.

He found what looked to be the area for public listings, and, coming to the volume for 1359 (or 1981, as it would be in the West), he pulled it out. There was a long list of names of those who had "served the Truth," and among these there were three Sefaredis, though none of them began to look like the man he knew. Going quickly through the long rows of tiny pictures of men, solemn-faced and bearded, on page after page after page, felt eerily like looking along the rows of gravestones in the cemeteries, a young boy's picture on each one, and a photo of Khomeini on the other side. He put the book back-no "Javad Sefaredi" here-and began to walk out.

As he did so, something made him think of another library, across the world, and Pauline's mention of how their adviser, in his younger days, had sometimes chosen to go, for whatever reason, by his father's name. He went back to the same shelves and pulled out the volume for 1358, seeing if he could spot any sign of an "Ardeshir Sefaredi."

He went quickly through the pages, and then a boy looked back at him-a full head of hair, a virgin's eyes, and some quality of ardor and possibility that looked nothing like the man he knew. The boy's beard was young, unformed, and he looked as if he had never heard of cuff links or Italian suits, let alone of California; the strongest element in his eyes was fear. But just behind the fear was something else, a kind of pride almost, that he could give himself over to the Revolution. The look of someone who might write a fiery treatise on the desert of faith in a land of anarchy.

He put the book back, and began to walk along the road he'd come on before. Children came up now and then and shouted, "Khareji, khareji!" A couple of boys looked at him as he walked past: who else but a spy would leave a rich country behind and come to their more difficult land? There was the sound of ironworkers in the distance, the ceaseless honking of taxis.

He heard almost none of it, though. He was thinking of a man-a boy, really-who had given up everything he knew, or loved, to serve it far away, in a place where his sacred texts would be turned into greeting cards, and his prayers treated as if they were just love songs.

"You look better," she said, looking up when he came in. "You must have found what you were looking for."

"I think I did," he said, and started packing away his things.

In the evening, when she fell asleep again, he went out one final time, following whatever prompt it was that told him he'd find what he needed here. In the late afternoon they'd gone, as if magnetically pulled, out to the great mosque, and found themselves in what might have seemed a whole city made of words; the yellow-and-blue patterns on the columns and the walls took its visitors into a realm of pure worship. In one area, she'd pointed out the calligraphy so free that even a mullah couldn't read it; the point, she'd said (no longer shy about telling him what she knew), was that you had to give up your rational mind and stop even trying to understand it. All that mattered was the pattern.

Walking through the mosque, and the square that led up to it, he'd felt erased, as if they'd moved, in some way, from a place where they were monarchs of everything they surveyed into another order, where they were very small indeed. Not just in space but in time as well, the centuries around them stretching out like the grand expanse of the desert. They'd left a world of moments for one in which people were governed by, even buried under, the grievances of four centuries before, or the rivalries of a previous dynasty. And all the years of enmity and suspicion gave the city a somewhat melancholy air, the more pronounced for all its beauty; he thought of a man who got up in his Sunday best-coat and tie and polished shoes-though his wife had died ten years ago and now he was eating alone every night.

He went out towards the main square again-the bridges illuminated after nightfall, so they seemed more than ever like props from fairy tale-and as he walked through the riddle of streets around the hotel, he caught smells of cooking from some kitchen, saw men seated in a circle on the floor, heard the slap of backgammon tiles from the cafes where the old men crouched over heavy wooden boards. Children ran this way and that in the dark, playing hide-and-seek or tag; a radio crackled from some far-off alleyway.

There was almost no one in the main square at this hour; only, in the distance, a few dim figures, just visible, drifting into the mosque for the day's last prayers. He sat on a bench and thought how his life and hers were threaded together like overlapping skeins in a carpet, as she'd said long before: the lecture the first afternoon, Oxford before that, all the other unexpected convergences that culminated here, in the city they'd both been thinking of, for different reasons, for so long.

"Hello, sir."

He turned around to see a young man beside him. In tight blue jeans and a black leather jacket; of college age, perhaps, careful not to get too close.

"Hello, sir. Where do you come from?"

"From England," he said, so taken aback he forgot the cover story they'd agreed on in advance.

"England, number one!" said the boy. Green eyes and a faintly feminine air.

He looked around them and realized there was no way out; the boy had timed his approach for when no one else was around.

"You like Isfahan, sir?"

"Very much, thank you."

"You come to our country many times?"

"This is the first. But I'd like to come back."

"Thank you, sir," said the boy, with a small bow. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then the boy again: "You stay one days, two days, in Isfahan?"

"A few. I leave tomorrow. You?"

"I am Isfahani, sir. I am student of your English."

They fell quiet again-they were linked now, but neither of them could think of anything to say-and then the boy said, "You come to my house, sir." It wasn't quite a statement, but it wasn't a question, either. He looked more closely at the boy but couldn't tell what lay behind the offer: maybe it was just the fact that he was alone (since, so long as he was with a woman, no one would ever invite them home)?

"Is it far?"

"Not far, sir. Close."

He looked at the boy and thought: if not now, when? The answer to his questions would not come in the streets.

They got up and walked together, away from the center, he trying to follow the names so he could find his way back, if need be, and the boy asking him about Michael Jackson, the Dream Team in Barcelona. They passed through a maze of dusty lanes-a figure called out to the boy from one of them, there was a group of boys in the dark in another-and he thought of the boys they'd seen in the streets this afternoon, agents, they'd agreed, for the regime's dirty work. (What teenager in Iran would have a room of his own, unless he had a high-up sponsor?) Finally, the boy stopped at a small black door, and ran up the steps inside it. He came after, smelling something rotting, fumbling against the wall in the dark.

At the top of the stairs was a square, empty room fit for an ascetic. On one wall, a torn calendar of Mecca; on another, wrapped in fine cloth on a shelf, what he took to be a Quran.