Authors: Vladimir Bartol
The commanders waited silently for them to come back. Hasan asked them quietly, “Is everything in order?”
“Everything is fine, Sayyiduna.”
Hasan gave a deep sigh.
“Let’s go to the top of the tower,” he said. “All of this is unfolding like a Greek tragedy. Praise be to Allah, the first act is over now.”
By evening, preparations in the gardens had been completed. The girls dispersed just as the supreme commander had determined. Miriam and her companions remained on the central island. The eunuchs rowed Fatima and Zuleika and their entourages to their designated gardens. Viewed from the castle, Fatima was to the left and Zuleika to the right of their permanent residence. Canals separated the three areas. Shah Rud embraced them at their circumference, drowning out voices in its roar, so that sounds from one island didn’t carry over to the others.
With the girls’ help, the eunuchs strung cords from shrub to shrub and from tree to tree around the pavilion, and then hung from them the lanterns that had been fashioned that morning. They were all sizes and shapes, and of varying designs and colors. When night fell, they set about lighting them. The surroundings came to life in a thoroughly new light, in new shapes and shadows. Everything was changed. The girls stared in amazement. They looked at each other. As they strolled down the paths, their faces and bodies glowed first in one color, then another. Spider-like shadows danced over them. Everything was quite wonderful and unreal. It was as though an image that they normally only saw in dreams had materialized. All around, where the band of light ended, everything was dense, impenetrable darkness. Neither the mountains nor the castle nor the stars could be seen.
The pavilions were practically buried in flowers. A fountain gurgled in the center of each of them, its streams of water falling to all sides and glinting in thousands of rainbow-like pearls. Food sat out on low, gilt tables, arranged on silver and gold trays. Braised fowl, baked fish, exquisitely prepared desserts and whole stacks of assorted fruit—figs, melons, oranges, apples, pears
and grapes. Each table was surrounded with six jugs of wine. Off to the sides were dishes of milk and honey.
At the time of the fifth prayer Adi rowed Apama from garden to garden one last time. She inspected everything closely and then issued final instructions. She handed Miriam, Fatima and Zuleika two little balls each, for putting the visitors to sleep—the second in case the first wasn’t fully effective. As she left she spoke to them.
“Don’t give the boys a chance to ask too many questions. Keep them busy. Above all, get them drunk, because Sayyiduna is just and strict.”
Once she had left, the girls knew that the decisive moment was approaching. Their leaders told them to drink a cup of wine to bolster their courage.
Fatima’s pavilion was the most lively one. The girls stifled their nervous impatience by shouting and laughing. The magical lighting and the wine did their job. In numbers their fear dissipated. The pending visit roused no more than the shivering excitement of an unfamiliar adventure.
“His name is Suleiman and Sayyiduna said that he’s handsome,” Leila remarked.
“I think you’re already out to get him,” Sara sniffed at her.
“Look who’s talking, the horniest one in the bunch.”
“Let’s have Halima start,” Khanum suggested.
But Halima was nerve-wracked.
“No, no, I for sure won’t.”
“Don’t be afraid, Halima,” Fatima comforted her. “I’m responsible for our success, and I’ll tell each of you what to do.”
“Which of us is he going to fall in love with?” Aisha asked.
“Your wiles aren’t going to help you much,” Sara belittled her.
“And your black skin even less.”
“Stop arguing,” Fatima pacified them. “It doesn’t matter whom he falls in love with. We serve Sayyiduna, and our only duty is to carry out his orders.”
“I think he’s going to fall in love with Zainab,” Halima said.
“Why do you think that?” Sara asked angrily.
“Because she has such pretty golden hair and such blue eyes.”
Zainab laughed at this.
“Do you think he’ll be more handsome than Sayyiduna?” Halima persisted.
“Look at this little monkey,” Fatima exclaimed. “Now she’s gone and fallen in love with Sayyiduna.”
“I think he’s handsome.”
“Halima, at least for tonight don’t be stubborn. Sayyiduna isn’t for us. You mustn’t talk about him like that.”
“But he’s fallen in love with Miriam.”
Sara was furious.
“And have you fallen in love with Miriam?”
“Don’t you ever blurt out anything like that again!” Fatima scolded her too.
“How is he going to be dressed?” Aisha wondered.
Sara grinned broadly.
“Dressed? He’ll be naked, of course.”
Halima put her hands out in front of herself.
“I won’t look at him if he is.”
“Listen!” Shehera suggested. “Let’s compose a poem for him.”
“Good idea! Fatima, go ahead.”
“But we haven’t even seen him yet.”
“Fatima is afraid he won’t be handsome enough,” Sara laughed.
“Don’t push me, Sara. I’ll give it a try. How about this: Handsome fellow Suleiman—came to paradise …”
“Silly!” Zainab exclaimed. “Suleiman is a hero who fought the Turks. It would be better to say: Fearless warrior Suleiman—came to paradise …”
“Now isn’t that poetic!” Fatima bristled. “Funny you didn’t sprain your tongue … Now listen to this: Bold gray falcon Suleiman—came to paradise. Caught sight of lovely Halima—could not believe his eyes.”
“No! Don’t put me in the poem!”
Halima was terrified.
“Silly child! Don’t be so serious. We’re just playing around.”
The girls around Zuleika were more preoccupied. Jada could barely stay on her feet, and Little Fatima retreated to the farthest corner, as though she would be safer there. Asma asked lots of silly questions, while Hanafiya and Zofana were arguing over nothing. Only Rokaya and Habiba maintained some degree of composure.
Zuleika was full of impatient anticipation. The honor of leading her section had gone to her head. She daydreamed about how the unknown, handsome Yusuf would fall in love with her and her alone, disdaining all the others. Among so many maidens, she would be the chosen one. And she deserved it, after all. Wasn’t she the most beautiful, the most voluptuous of them all?
When she had drunk her cup of wine, she grew mellow in a very particular way. She was blind to everything around her. She took up her harp and began to pluck the strings. In her imagination she saw herself as loved and desired. She charmed, she conquered, and without realizing it, she gradually fell in love with the stranger they were awaiting.
Despite all the luxury, everything was bleak and grim around Miriam. The
girls in her pavilion were among the shyest and least independent. They would have liked to press close to Miriam and seek support from her. But Miriam was distant from them with her thoughts.
She hadn’t thought that the realization Hasan didn’t love her would affect her so much. And maybe that wasn’t even the real cause of her pain. Worst of all she knew that she was just a means for Hasan, a tool that would help him attain some goal that had nothing to do with love. Calmly, without jealousy, he was handing her over to another for the night.
She knew men. Moses, her husband, had been old and disgusting. But without her ever having articulated it, it was clear to her that he would rather die than allow another man to touch her. Mohammed, her love, had risked and lost his life to get her. When they later sold her in Basra, she never lost sight of the fact that any master who bought her wouldn’t let another man near her, even though she was a slave. She still preserved this faith in herself when she became Hasan’s property. His decision today had shaken the foundations of her self-confidence and humiliated her to the core.
She would have cried if she could have. But it was as though her eyes were no longer capable of tears. Did she hate Hasan? Her feelings were strangely complex. At first it had been clear that she had no choice but to throw herself into Shah Rud. Then she decided to take revenge. That desire faded too, and gave way to profound sorrow. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that Hasan’s behavior had been utterly consistent. His views, full of contempt for everything the masses held sacred and indisputable, his ambivalence about all received knowledge, his absolute freedom of thought and action—hadn’t all these things charmed and irritated her countless times? Those had been words. She herself was too weak to either dare or be able to turn them into actions. Likewise, she hadn’t assumed that he was that powerful.
Now she was beginning to understand this side of him too. In some way he had been inclined toward her, and perhaps he even liked her. She felt she had to respect him. For him, understanding something intellectually was at the same time a commandment to make it happen. His intellectual conclusions were also obligations. How many times had she told him that she was no longer capable of truly loving anyone, that she couldn’t believe in anything, and that she didn’t recognize the existence of universally applicable laws of behavior? She had acted as though she had long since shaken off any prejudices. With his last decision, hadn’t he shown that he believed her? That he respected her?
Nothing was clear to her anymore. No matter what she thought, no matter how much she tried to understand it all, ultimately she was left with the pain, with the knowledge that she had been humiliated, and that for
Hasan she was just an object that he could move around however his interests dictated.
Furtively she was drinking more wine than she should and emptying cup after cup. But she felt she was just getting more and more sober. Suddenly she realized that she was actually waiting for someone. Strangely, all that time she hadn’t once thought of ibn Tahir. Hasan had told her that he was exceptionally bright and a poet. Something strange came over her, as though she had been brushed by an invisible wing. She shuddered, sensing the nearness of fate.
She picked up her harp and pulled her fingers across the strings. It groaned, plaintively and longingly.
“How beautiful she is tonight,” Safiya whispered. She glanced toward Miriam.
“When ibn Tahir sees her, he’ll fall in love right away,” Khadija commented.
“How nice that will be,” Safiya grew excited. “Let’s compose a poem for them.”
“Would you like for him to fall in love with her that much?”
“Absolutely.”
Wordlessly the grand dais accompanied Hasan to the top of the tower. Once out on the platform, they noticed a dull glow that attenuated the starlight on the side where the gardens were located. They went with Hasan up to the battlements and looked over the edge.
The three pavilions were awash in a sea of light. They were illuminated both inside and out. Through their glass towers and walls, everything moving inside them could be seen, infinitely reduced in size.
“You’re a master without equal,” Abu Ali said. “I’d say you’ve sworn to take us from one surprise to the next.”
“It’s like magic from the
Thousand and One Nights
,” Buzurg Ummid murmured. “Even the most serious doubts fade in the face of your abilities.”
“Wait, don’t praise me too soon,” Hasan laughed. “Apparently our youths are still sleeping down there. The curtain hasn’t even gone up yet. We won’t see if the work was worth it until that happens.”
He described the arrangement of the gardens to them, and which of the threesome was in which pavilion.
“It’s completely incomprehensible to me,” Abu Ali said, “how you were able to come up with the idea for this plan. The only explanation I can think of is that you must have been inspired by some spirit. But not by Allah.”
“Oh, for sure it wasn’t Allah,” Hasan replied, smiling. “More like our old friend Omar Khayyam.”
He told his friends about how he had visited him twenty years before in Nishapur, and how he had unwittingly provided him with the inspiration for his experiment of this evening.
Abu Ali was astonished.
“You mean to say you’ve had this plan since then? And you didn’t lose your mind? By the beard of the martyr Ali! I couldn’t have held out for a month if I’d come up with anything so superb. I’d throw myself into making it happen, and I wouldn’t give up until I either succeeded or failed.”
“I decided I would do everything humanly possible to make sure I didn’t fail. An idea like this grows and develops in the human soul like a baby in its mother’s body. At first it’s utterly helpless, it lacks a clear shape, it just provokes a passionate longing that drives you to persist. It has a tremendous power. It gradually haunts and possesses its bearer, so that he doesn’t see or think of anything else but it. His only desire is to embody it, to bring this wonderful monster into the world. With a thought like that in your gut, you really are like a madman. You don’t ask if it’s right or wrong, if it’s good or bad. You act on some invisible command. All you know is that you’re a means, in thrall to something more powerful than yourself. Whether that power is heaven, or whether it’s hell, you don’t care!”
“So all twenty years you didn’t even try to realize your plan? You didn’t even have a soul to share it with?”
Abu Ali couldn’t comprehend this. Hasan just laughed.
“If I had shared my plan with you or any of my friends, you would have thought I was a fool. I won’t deny that I did try, in my impatience, to realize it. Prematurely realize it, to be sure. Because subsequently I always realized that the obstacles that came across my path kept me from making irrevocable missteps. The first attempt to carry out my plan came shortly after Omar Khayyam provided it to me. You see, he had advised me to appeal to the grand vizier to fulfill his youthful vow and help me advance, as he’d already done for Omar. Nizam al-Mulk obliged me, as I’d expected. He recommended me to the sultan as his friend, and I was accepted into the court. You can imagine I was a more entertaining courtier than the grand vizier. I soon won the sultan’s favor, and he began advancing me ahead of the others. Of course, this was just grist for my mill. I was waiting for an opportunity to ask the sultan for the command of units in some military campaign. But I was still so naive that I didn’t reckon with the bitter jealousy that my successes aroused in my former schoolmate. I found it perfectly natural for the two of us to compete. But he took it as a great humiliation. This came out when the sultan wanted to have an account of all the income and expenses of his enormous empire. He asked Nizam al-Mulk how soon he could pull all the necessary numbers together. ‘I need at least two years to complete the task,’ the vizier estimated. ‘What? Two years?’ I exclaimed. ‘Give me forty days and
I’ll have a meticulous list covering the whole land. Just give me your officials to work with.’ My classmate went pale and left the room without a word. The sultan accepted my proposal, and I was happy to have the chance to prove my abilities. I recruited all of my confidants throughout the empire for the job, and with their help and that of the sultan’s officials, I actually managed to collect the numbers on all the revenues and outlays in the country within forty days. When the deadline came, I appeared before the sultan with the records. I started to read, but I had barely gotten through a few pages when I realized that someone had substituted the wrong lists. I started stammering and tried to supply the missing information from memory. But the sultan had already noticed my confusion. He lost his temper and his lips began to tremble with rage. Then the grand vizier said to him, ‘Wise men have calculated that it would take at least two years to complete this task. So how else is a frivolous idiot who boasted he would complete it in forty days to answer, but with incoherent prattle?’ I could feel him laughing maliciously inside. I knew he had played this trick on me. But there was no joking with the sultan. I had to leave the court in disgrace and head for Egypt. In the sultan’s eyes I remained a shameless buffoon. Since then the grand vizier has been living in fear of my revenge, and he’s done everything to try to destroy me. That’s how the first chance to realize my plan fell through. And I don’t regret it. Because I greatly fear the birth would have been premature …”