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Yes, I know the people I serve daily are for the greater part rich and spoiled, with an inflated idea of their own worth. My parents’ country was once led by a secular despot, and now it lies in the grip of fanatical clergy; everywhere in the world, the powerful and wealthy regard their position as theirs by right, whether they seized it outright or believe it the will of God. They see those who serve them, and yet they do not see.
My parents were lifelong freethinkers, and knew the scrutiny they would have endured in Iran under the Ayatollahs. I think, too, that although I barely knew who I was as a boy of ten, they did, and knew how the regime would treat the man I would become. I do not know whether they had any greater ambition for me than that I be able to one day live the truth of my heart, without daily fear of the lash or even the scaffold.
Certainly my occupation seems never to have brought them anything but pride. It is a craft, what we do; when you can inform a tribal monarch – who may, tomorrow, be received in Downing Street – that he must wear a tie in the Palm Court, without damaging his pride, you teach him respect for your adopted country. You may have averted an international incident.
My name is Fereydoon, which is the name of a king in the great epic of Firdausi; but my first lover was fonder of reading aloud the poems of Rumi or Hafiz, and he would tell me that I was like a beautiful cup-bearer in the court of a Caliph. Perhaps it was that which moved me toward my calling. I was young then – barely old enough for what we did together to be condoned, even today, by my new country's laws – but I have never felt that it was wrong, nor was our inevitable parting bitter. People grow, and change, and the duty of Love is to hold close the joy and release the beloved when it is time to go. So I stored up his words in my heart.
The cup-bearer, you see, is not a mere servant; he is a curator of his patron’s comfort and safety, his confidant, the repository of his trust. To bring food and drink is to hold power over another’s health and life, as much as if one is his bodyguard or physician. So I viewed it as a position of honour to wait at table when the time came for me to contribute to our family’s fortunes; I found a situation at an establishment with a small history and a large custom, and what I did not know about the craft, I began to learn.
It harmed nothing that I was beautiful then (today, I am told, I am handsome and have a bearing). I could tell the man saw it who offered me the post, but never was his conduct anything other than proper. He saw that I was trained (for there are schools of the craft, just as the courtiers of old required grooming by those with experience). And when I had risen to captain, only to find a situation yet more rewarding elsewhere, he, like my old lover, parted with nothing but joy.
So I served the wealthy and noble, and the gracious and the not-so-gracious; smoothed over mishaps at table, calmed truculent gentlemen of privilege and distraught gilded ladies. I became, finally, the face of the most celebrated hotel in London – still a crossroads of nations, even in England’s latter state – the one whose greeting assured the jaded rich and the dazzled tourist alike that, whatever might be happening elsewhere in their lives, this afternoon or evening would be magnificent and without flaw.
The two gentlemen began to dine with us regularly at about the time that the financial markets suffered so greatly. They always seemed a little troubled, and I assumed that they had reason for concern about the Exchange or the like, though not enough to deter them from going through the wine list without a care for cost. They never showed any sign of dining too well, as the English call it, unlike many sons of peers and lords of industry for whom I have discreetly summoned a porter or a taxicab.
From the first, there were two curious things. They never seemed to reserve; somehow, they appeared, uncannily, at times when a long-held reservation had just been cancelled at the last minute, asking whether a table might be available, if you would be so kind as to check and see. That was the heavier-set man, who dressed with the elegant shabbiness of the truly wealthy – clothing that, though out of date and worn a bit threadbare across the waistcoat, was perfectly correct – and behaved with such grace that I never encountered him without the sensation that I had been strangely blessed.
The second man was slender, with the red hair of a Tajik, consciously handsome like an older film star (like one, he wore sunglasses everywhere). His attire was never entirely proper, yet somehow – this is the second curious thing – I could not bring myself to utter my customary diplomatic reproof. He rarely ate more than morsels, eyes bent only on his companion. There is a saying that in every couple, there is one who kisses and one who offers the cheek, and I thought I could see which one was which.
As time passed, even without reservations, I learned their names (I will not give them here; discretion is central to our craft), and the heavier, pale-haired man always remembered mine. They were the last patrons I would have expected to cause a disturbance, though they began to look more weary over the years; there was a tension one could sense from across the room, and yet they remained companions, all their movements like a dance between those who have moved together for so long that they know no way of being apart.
Yet I saw the kiss longing for acceptance, I saw the complacent cheek; and I saw that some other concern afflicted them both. I remembered the prickliness between my parents after we fled, during those days of uncertainty and statelessness, when we belonged to neither one country nor the other.
I do not know what occasioned the quarrel. I heard only a sharp remark about “your lot” in a raised voice, and something about rude notes, and it flashed through my mind that even men of their age have families who are not so accepting as mine; it is often the cause of painful disputes. The thin one, with his long limbs like a gilaki dancer’s, always sprawled and teetered in his chair – again, somehow I could never find a way to admonish him – but until tonight he had never tipped one over, nor a glass either.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, “I can’t just sit here and eat truffle butter waiting for it all to burn down,” and without righting the chair he stalked from the dining room.
I hastened to manage the situation. It is nothing to replace a chair, but much more to restore the equilibrium of a distressed diner. I looked at the cheek (not kissed, I thought), pink and hot with embarrassment, at the water-blue eyes filled with distress (and like water, with every colour behind their blue; oh, he was beautiful still, I could imagine how his companion must have gazed at their first meeting).
“Fereydoon,” he said. “I am so sorry. I apologize for my – my friend. He has been under… a great deal of stress.” A folded banknote appeared in his hand, somehow without his reaching into any pocket. “Please, accept this.”
“You have been with us so long. Think nothing of it.” But I pocketed the note, for that also is part of the language of our craft, by which we acknowledge the honour we are paid by the discerning.
“I fear I don’t know what to think,” he said, and his voice quavered. “Things are… I can’t tell you how they are.” And on his face I saw not just distress, but actual fear.
I have seen such expressions here, on the faces of men in power who know they will soon be sending envoys to hostile territories or troops into the field; men who hold fates in their hands and struggle to balance the weight. But the loss in his eyes was greater, the hurt at the lash of the other man’s anger.
Sometimes, when such anger flares, it is a sign that the time for parting has been outstayed. Parting happens, and must be accepted; but – I do not yet know how – something told me that here were two who must be together for eternity. I cannot tell you what gave me the temerity to speak, except for this.
“I see how deeply you feel,” I said softly. “Go, and tell him.”
He looked up at me sharply. I have never spoken in this way to a patron. One simply does not. Yet it seemed imperative, as if the world hinged on it, that these two remain one.
“Dare I tell him?” he said, and the candour and longing in his gaze was infinite.
For a moment I had no answer. How, I thought, after all this time, could they have failed to speak what anyone could see? “He is one who has not been cherished,” I found myself saying. “Many such as we are not. Not all families are forgiving, and the wound does not heal. I have seen it.”
“Such as we?” he said with a sudden, guarded glance. I held his eyes. He understood, I am sure.
“Open your heart,” I said. “I see the two of you seated here like light and darkness, one defined by the other. You speak as if sharing music, you are still in each other’s silences. It appears there is only the one thing you do not say, and it should have long since been said.”
What was I doing? What folly had loosed my tongue? A verse of Rumi came to me: “You know his scent in an empty room,” I said, “the lift of his heel, the glide of his foot.”
He dropped his eyes to the stained tablecloth. “How can I tell him,” he said, “and keep him safe?” It is a question many in my homeland have asked, and will continue to ask; but what, here in the West, could he have to fear?
“You will find your moment,” I said. “Whatever has happened, if you can come together, you will put it right. Go, catch him up. I know you will honour your bill.”
And then Colin and Owen appeared, to clear the table and whisk away the spoiled linens. I retreated to my station, to wonder if I had gone slightly mad.
I thought of what had happened the next day, and the day after that. Each time I wondered if I had imagined the incident, my own boldness, the look in the blue eyes. Only the faint stain on the tablecloth, which had to be passed three times through the laundry, told me it had been real.
And then came the day we all remember yet do not remember, when those of us who have known fear and flight felt we were in a waking dream, yet cannot say what occurred – only that for a few hours, it seemed as if doom stalked the world and the voices of thousands cried out. It passed, and all was well – remarkably well, the way the world seems to you after a fever breaks – and none of us who felt it could agree what had happened, only that something had. I could only rise the next day, and put on the garments of my office, and assume my station.
And then they entered together, hand in hand, laughing.
I looked at the tablet, and found that an American software magnate had just cancelled a reservation for two.
I placed the rose in the vase and lit the tealight myself, and told them as I poured with my own hands that there would be no charge for the champagne.