Damon Knight - Orbit 20

“You brought him sandwiches at the first intermission—I was watching you through the peephole in the curtain. You must be a very thoughtful person.”

“Do you watch everyone in the audience so carefully?”

She blushed at that, and for a moment could not meet my eyes.

“But you will forgive Bobby, and tell the police that you want them to let him go? You must love the theater, Mr. Jef— Jaff-”

“You’ve forgotten my name already. It is Jaffarzadeh, a very commonplace name in my country.”

“I hadn’t forgotten it—only how to pronounce it. You see, when I came here I had learned it without knowing who you were, and so I had no trouble with it. Now you’re a real person to me and I can’t say it as an actress should.” She seemed to notice the chair behind her for the first time, and sat down.

I sat opposite her. “I’m afraid I know very little about the theater.”

“We are trying to keep it alive here, Mr. Jaffar, and—”

“Jaffarzadeh. Call me Nadan—then you won’t have so many syllables to trip over.”

She took my hand in hers, and I knew quite well that the gesture was as studied as a salaam and that she felt she was playing me like a fish; but I was beside myself with delight. To be played by her! To have her eager to cultivate my affection! And the fish will pull her in yet—wait and see!

“I will,” she said, “Nadan. And though you may know little of the theater, you feel as I do—as we do—or you would not come. It has been such a long struggle; all the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive. We have been doing well here in Washington, Nadan.”

“Very well indeed,” I said. “Both the productions I have seen have been excellent.”

“But only for the past two seasons. When I joined the company it had nearly fallen apart. We revived it—Bobby and Paul and I. We could do it because we cared, and because we were able to find a few naturally talented people who can take direction. Bobby is the best of us—he can walk away with any part that calls for a touch of the sinister ...”

She seemed to run out of breath. I said, “I don’t think there will be any trouble about getting him free.”

“Thank God. We’re getting the theater on its feet again now. We’re attracting new people, and we’ve built up a following— people who come to see every production. There’s even some money ahead at last. But Mary Rose is supposed to run another two weeks, and after that we’re doing Faust, with Bobby as Me-phistopheles. We’ve simply no one who can take his place, no one who can come close to him.”

“I’m sure the police will release him if I ask them to.”

“They must. We have to have him tomorrow night. Bill—someone you don’t know—tried to go on for him in the third act tonight. It was just ghastly. In Iran you’re very polite; that’s what I’ve heard.”

“We enjoy thinking so.”

“We’re not. We never were; and as . . .”

Her voice trailed away, but a wave of one slender arm evoked everything—the cracked plaster walls became as air, and the decayed city, the ruined continent, entered the room with us. “I understand,” I said.

“They—we—were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated we are ready to kill; and maybe we feel cheated all the time.”

She slumped in her chair, and I realized, as I should have long before, how exhausted she was. She had given a performance that had ended in disaster, then had been forced to plead with the police for my name and address, and at last had come here from the station house, very probably on foot. I asked when I could obtain O’Keene’s release.

“We can go tomorrow morning, if you’ll do it.”

“You wish to come too?”

She nodded, smoothed her skirt, and stood. “I’ll have to know. I’ll come for you about nine, if that’s all right.”

“If you’ll wait outside for me to dress, I’ll take you home.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It will only take a moment,” I said.

The blue eyes held something pleading again. “You’re going to come in with me—that’s what you’re thinking, I know. You have two beds here—bigger, cleaner beds than the one I have in my little apartment; if I were to ask you to push them together, would you still take me home afterward?”

It was as though I were dreaming indeed—a dream in which everything I wanted—the cosmos purified—delivered itself to me. I said, “You won’t have to leave at all—you can spend the night with me. Then we can breakfast together before we go to release your friend.”

She laughed again, lifting that exquisite head. “There are a hundred things at home I need. Do you think I’d have breakfast with you without my cosmetics, and in these dirty clothes?”

“Then I will take you home—yes, though you lived in Kazvin. Or on Mount Kaf.”

She smiled. “Get dressed, then. I’ll wait outside, and I’ll show you my apartment; perhaps you won’t want to come back here afterward.”

She went out, her wooden-soled American shoes clicking on the bare floor, and I threw on trousers, shirt, and jacket, and jammed my feet into my boots. When I opened the door, she was gone. I rushed to the barred window at the end of the corridor, and was in time to see her disappear down a side street. A last swirl of her skirt in a gust of night wind, and she had vanished into the velvet dark.

For a long time I stood there looking out over the ruinous buildings. I was not angry—I do not think I could be angry with her. I was, though here it is hard to tell the truth, in some way glad. Not because I feared the embrace of love—I have no doubt of my ability to suffice any woman who can be sated by man—but because an easy exchange of my cooperation for her person would have failed to satisfy my need for romance, for adventure of a certain type, in which danger and love are twined like coupling serpents. Ardis, my Ellen, will provide that, surely, as neither Yasmin nor the pitiful wanton who was her double could. I sense that the world is opening for me only now; that I am being born; that that corridor was the birth canal, and that Ardis in leaving me was drawing me out toward her.

When I returned to my own door, I noticed a bit of paper on the floor before it. I transcribe it exactly here, though I cannot transmit its scent of lilacs.

You are a most attractive man and I want very much to stretch the truth and tell you you can have me freely when Bobby is free but I won’t sell myself etc. Really I will sell myself for Bobby but I have other fish to fry tonight. I’ll see you in the morning and if you can get Bobby out or even try hard you’ll have (real) love from the vanishing

Mary Rose

Morning. Woke early and ate here at the hotel as usual, finishing about eight. Writing this journal will give me something to do while I wait for Ardis. Had an American breakfast today, the first time I have risked one. Flakes of pastry dough toasted crisp and drenched with cream, and with it strudel and the usual American coffee. Most natives have spiced pork in one form or another, which I cannot bring myself to try; but several of the people around me were having egg dishes and oven-warmed bread, which I will sample tomorrow.

I had a very unpleasant dream last night; I have been trying to put it out of my mind ever since I woke. It was dark, and I was under an open sky with Ardis, walking over ground much rougher than anything I saw in the park on the farther side of the channel. One of the hideous creatures I shot night before last was pursuing us—or rather, lurking about us, for it appeared first to the left of us, then to the right, silhouetted against the night sky. Each time we saw it, Ardis grasped my arm and urged me to shoot, but the little indicator light on my pistol was glowing red to show that there was not enough charge left for a shot. All very silly, of course, but I am going to buy a fresh powerpack as soon as I have the opportunity.