Ardmore, PA

Javad often asked of you. What news did I have? There was a time when all I knew was that you may or may not be in Budapest, or somewhere in Bulgaria. He explained to me that I was wrong not to know. You must find him, he said. What if something has happened to him? I said that I did not know, there was really no way of knowing. I was here and he was there, or maybe elsewhere. I did not have reliable information. He sat quietly, looking ahead at where the black and white photo of Arvo Part, the great Estonian composer, hung between the bookshelves. He sipped at his scotch. I sipped at mine.

We were sitting in his basement drinking and talking as we had done since I was at the university. His wife and child had long since gone to bed and it was very early in the morning now. We had arrived at the final third of the bottle and the silence had come over him. I had not fully adjusted to these long silences but had stopped trying to end them with talk and I was trying to convince myself to enjoy this one. I understood that he was remembering his closest friend, who had died in Iran, a death that he was unable to give up. His friend, a great Iranian actor and painter and poet, had been thrown from a horse drawn buggy while filming a scene, and had stuck his head against some rocks. Javad had last seen him before the revolution in 1979. In Iran he was buried somewhere and there was now only his wonderful self-portrait that hung on the wall behind us. It was one of my favorite paintings and I always thought it might have hung in one of the museums and become the favorite of many other people.

Javad understood, perhaps better than I, that people live and die and sometimes get into trouble and if a person was important you did not let them disappear, but you searched them out. He understood that when they were dead and you heard of it later, and you were far away and you would never see them again, when all you had was the scotch and one painting on your wall--and it was even rumored that some fools had taken his other paintings and simply destroyed them, burned them or thrown them onto a trash heap-- that then their death would not be possible to accept. Javad worried that you were potentially in trouble somewhere, at that very moment, and that your life and work were to be lost and my finding out of it later, when I could do nothing, would be as destructive to me as it had been to him. I sipped at my scotch uneasily and waited for him to speak.

What I did not know was that you were safe. You had successfully escaped a deceitful and dangerous woman and fled Budapest to Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. You were there under the assumption that I lived not far from you at the base of the Piren Mountains. You had recently traveled in the mountains and passing by a small hut in Banska had heard a pocket trumpet, what you believed was my pocket trumpet, playing along to a jazz record. The jazz great of the mountains, known only to the locals as “Stoil”, you falsely believed was me.