"You'll look after me?"

"With my life."

The boy returned now, smiling, and they followed him out, tentatively, into the square. As he led them into the forbidden city, men in black passed on every side, sometimes stealing a glance at this foreigner in secular dress, or the figure beside him, pale, they could see, even with her headdress on. They moved like newspaper sentences in a holy book. "This is really okay?" she asked, but the boy was moving quickly, with a foreign air of purpose, down one lane, then another.

At last they came to a small black door. The boy opened it, and then climbed up a dark flight of stairs-Isfahan again-to what looked to be a small, dark cell. From outside came the sound of argument.

"You will drink some tea?"

"No, thank you."

"You would like some tea?"

"No. We're fine."

"You will join me in some tea?"

"Thank you," he said, registering the ritual of the three-part refusal, and the boy went out, returning very soon with three glasses of tea, a plate of figs.

"You are a teacher in your country?" the boy said as they sipped the tea.

"In Denmark," he said heavily, "my wife is a teacher. I am-well, actually, I am a student of Sufi poetry." It was clearly the most dangerous answer he could have given.

"You are interested in Islam?" said the boy, newly alert.

"A little. Saadi. Rumi. We went to Hafez's tomb yesterday."

"You are a good friend of Islam," said the boy, with what intention he couldn't tell; the town was old enough to entertain many levels of irony.

"And you?" To redirect the questioning.

"Shiraz," said the boy. "Mother, father in Shiraz."

"But you're here for good now?"

"God willing," said the boy.

They braved the figs, the bitter tea; there seemed no more to say.

"For what reason do you study Islam?" the boy tried again, his directness so sharp it could have been that of a spy (or of someone so guileless he didn't know he sounded like a spy).

"I like the ideas about surrender. Giving up." The boy looked confused. " 'Die before you die,' " he said, quoting the Prophet's reputed maxim in Farsi.

"You speak our language."

"Not really. Just a little."

Nobody said anything for a few moments, and he began to think that it was time to make an exit. He looked across at her to give a sign, and suddenly she spoke up.

"You should show our new friend what you've brought with you."

"He wouldn't be interested."

"Show him. He may be able to help you."

"What is this?" said the boy, curiosity aroused. "What do you have?"

"Nothing," he said, but she spoke up for him. "He has some poems he wants somebody to look at."

The boy looked at him expectantly.

He pulled the worn copies out of his pocket, the creased pages so crumpled and bent over that they were almost impossible to read. They'd been on his person so long they seemed to be a part of him. Then, very slowly, he handed them over.

The boy looked at the pages for a long time and said nothing. Finally, turning back to the first, the third, he said, "These are from Jalaluddin? Mathnawi?"

"I don't know, to be honest. Someone gave them to me in California. I don't know what they are."

The boy looked at them again, turning from page to page, careful not to tear the old pages. Then, at last, he handed them back again.

"Beautiful," he said. "Some. Some I don't like."

"Do you think they're authentic?"

The boy looked back at him, his English overtaxed.

"I mean, do you think they're real?"

"Of course they are real. They are here."

"Yes," he said. "You're right." He looked over to her to indicate they should take their leave of him, and saw a Camilla who looked new: transfigured, somehow, in this unfamiliar place, radiant and at peace.

"Do you think they're old?" he said, as they got up to leave.

The boy got up too and said, "The feeling is true. You cannot have an old feeling."

"You're right," he said again. "Thank you for the tea, for showing us your room."

"I show you only my room. You show me the light of God."

The answer was so genuine it shamed him, mocking his petty thoughts with its reference to what the poems meant, and the light that was their message.

Then, as they were walking to the door, the boy stopped again, as if he had been struck by something.

"I know who wrote those poems," he said.

"You do?"

"I know," said the boy, as they turned to him. "Your wife wrote them." He smiled. "You wrote them. I wrote them. In Qom we say, 'When we hear music, it is not coming from the radio.' "

"It all comes from God, you mean?"

"Thank you," said the boy, and then he was leading them down the steps, very fast, and back into the fallen world.

The next day, as they'd half expected, Iran fell away from them as if it had never happened. So far from everything they knew that even by the time they were in the airport, on the plane out, it seemed like a dream, or something they'd imagined. She fell asleep very soon, full up, no doubt, with all that she'd experienced, and he, paging through his notes for the last time, took out the crumbling pages as if to say goodbye to them.

The heart of their secret lay, he'd always felt, in the final two poems, the ones that seemed to have the least reason for being there. The well-known poem about the dove from Andalusia was a strange thing to put near the end, and the final one was so lacking in mystery, so clunky in its way, that at some level it seemed the most mysterious of all.

He looked down the long line of words trailing down in his translation.

My hand

Your hand

Connected

Over

His hand.

No division in

Our hearts.

The "in" could be replaced by an "among," but that would not change very much at all. The only other word that could be different was that ungainly "connected" in the third line. He penned in "linked," but that hardly seemed to help at all. It could be "joined," too, and he wrote that in now to see if it would change anything.

He'd never know, years later, what moved him at that moment to look at the translation in that strange way, almost as if the words themselves were less important than the patterns they made on the page; almost as if they were glyphs or markings only, not carriers of meaning. But as he ran his eye quickly down the beginnings of the lines, he remembered something she'd told him once about the games she liked to play in school.

M y hand

Y our hand

J oined.

O ver.

H is hand.

N o division in

O ur hearts.

He looked at her-closer than ever, perhaps, to a young man who had come from Tehran to Los Angeles, hope alight, and closer, even, perhaps, to a young woman who had come from Denmark to the New World, with some hopes of her own,t and then he turned again to the last poem in the book but one.

Asleep, and being comforted by a cool breeze,

Suddenly, I saw a grey dove

Soar above the trees and sob with longing;