One Thousand and One Nights (19 page)

“Look at its huge wings; aren’t they like those of an angel? Perhaps it’s a beautifully coloured angel seeking to rescue you from your own thoughts!”

The five of us laughed, while the giant bird flew towards me and hovered, fluttering its wings vigorously and uttering strange cries, soft and loud at the same time.

“This bird is no angel, but the man you are looking for!” my elder sisters cried out, as we laughed again. The bird flew away and joined a flock of these strange and enormous creatures, with their huge, brightly coloured wings.

I forgot completely about this bird until a few days later, when I went down to the manna from heaven trees by the pond, to find out whether the manna was ripe. In the distance I could see the
enormous, colourful bird drinking from the pond. To my astonishment, I watched as the bird started to shake and shake, until a man emerged from beneath its feathers.

I put my hand to my mouth, gasping and suppressing a scream of confusion and amazement. I walked towards him as though hypnotised, feeling no fear. The man was looking at the house and did not seem to have noticed me. He was not like any other man I had ever encountered, he was so beautiful.

“Praise God who resembles no one,” I murmured, for I had never seen a man as handsome as he. He had a face like the crescent moon, with rosy cheeks and eyes like those of a
houri
, as if God had created him to bewitch and enchant.

I calmed myself, and didn’t try to catch his attention, but waited and watched as he walked very carefully towards our terrace. Then he entered his feathers again and flew away, leaving me to stare at the sky, speechless.

When I climbed into bed that night and shut my eyes, I saw only him, as if he stayed beneath my lids the whole night long. In the morning, I rushed to the pond but neither the bird nor the man was to be seen. I found myself checking the pond several times during the day, to no avail, until dusk fell. To my disappointment I then saw ten birds instead of one at the pond, playing, drinking and taking off and landing on the water. Eventually all of them flew away and my heart sank. But the same bird flew back, landed, shook and shook, and when he had become a man, he saw me standing not far from him. He smiled at me and I reached out and touched his feathers, which were soft and beautifully decorated.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” I asked him.

“But have you forgotten that you yourself invited me? Did I not hear you say the other night, as you sat with your sisters, ‘Where
is the man who would not deceive me and steal my money? Show him to me, for God’s sake?’ I am that man you called for, and I hurried to comply with your wishes, of that you may rest assured, my beauty.”

He took my hand in his and when I recoiled and moved away, he said, “Do not be alarmed. Here is my oath: my eye will not look at one dinar of your money and my hand will not touch one piece of bread from your table. On the contrary, I am planning to have you sleep in a bed of gold, eat from golden plates, and bathe in water of gold.”

“But who are you really?” I asked, as I tried to still the hundreds of butterflies which fluttered in my heart in spite of myself.

“When I saw you, I lost my senses, for you took my breath away. My brothers and I come often to the pond in your orchard towards evening to drink from its fresh water. Yesterday evening I reached the pond earlier than usual. As I waited for my brothers, I heard voices. I felt curious, since I was accustomed to the stillness here, and found myself following the sound until I saw you like a rose among these women. I listened to the entire conversation with your sisters, and found myself marvelling, not at your beauty and charm, but at what I heard you saying and for your dazzling personality. I went back home and couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking of you, and so I came back to you, for my heart now is aflame.”

His words scared me even more, and my mind started to play tricks on me. Perhaps this man was planning to make me fall in his trap, only to suck my nectar, then desert me exactly like the four men who had disgraced my two sisters?

I froze, not knowing what to say. The man took things out of his wing, and I stood overwhelmed as he produced jewels, among them pearls as big as pigeon’s eggs, saying, “Now do you believe that I want you for yourself and not for your fortune?”

He bowed and kissed my two hands and my feet. “I will be your obedient servant until Doomsday. I wish to marry you according to the rule of God and his Prophet.”

At these words, I changed my opinion of men in the blink of an eye. I took him to a cave in our orchard, and there we kissed like Adam and Eve, and to my surprise I let him lift up my dress, and what would happen between a man and a woman happened between us, while I prayed to God to forgive me, assuring the Almighty that we would draw up our marriage contract first thing in the morning. Soon I found myself drowning in ecstasy and pleasure for the first time in my life. I then slept at his feet, and when I woke we sat content and fulfilled, holding the sun and the moon together. I asked him once more: “You haven’t told me who you are. Are you the son of a prince bewitched, one of the greatest merchants, or a nobleman?”

“I will reveal my identity to you on one condition: you must promise me that no matter what your ears hear me reveal, you will never leave me.”

I clasped my heart, and I felt myself break into a sweat as I said, “I promise on my memory of my parents that I will never leave you, unless you tell me you’re the Shaytan, Satan himself.”

The man laughed. “God save us from Satan, I am the son of the King Azraq Blue, the King of Jinnis, the enemies of Shaytan Satan, and my father lives in the Alakroom Citadel, and he has six hundred thousand jinnis, who dive in the deepest seas and fly in the vast sky. I have nine brothers, each of whom carry the name of our father, Azraq Blue, and we fly here and there in God’s wildest world.”

I caught my breath and said, “Glory to God, the omnipotent, the Almighty, the powerful.”

Then I thanked God for sending me this flying man.

He took my hand, saying, “Come with me, let us fly together to my palace which is built in the air, and can be reached by neither human beings nor jinnis other than my brothers, who would take you as one of them.”

All of a sudden, reality hit me. What was I thinking, falling in love with this man, now that I knew he was a jinni? Dazed and confused, I found myself saying, “I do not wish to go to any palace, either in the clouds or on the ground. I will live only in the house which my father built for us, and in which I grew up. You are probably not aware that I am the head of this family and I am an accomplished tradeswoman, as well as being responsible for the well-being of my four sisters. How can you ask me to fly away with you, and give up all that my God has bestowed upon me? I am certain that I would soon miss my sisters and Baghdad and then I would regret what I had done and cease to sleep peacefully and happily in your arms.”

I started to weep, feeling sorry for myself. Life had finally smiled at me and I had fallen in love with the man of my dreams, whom I thought I would never find in teeming Baghdad. But then he turned out to be the son of the King of Jinnis!

“But how will I leave my brothers? Why did my heart flutter only for you, a human being? How could I cease to be a jinni?”

Then we wept together, embraced and wept even more, knowing that we were making the decision to separate; that our love was forbidden. We kissed and hugged and bade farewell to each other, and then hurried back and embraced again and again. He wiped my tears, I wiped his tears and then I ran home, stopping to look back just once more, to see him fly up and disappear.

I couldn’t stay away from the pond. I checked again and again, and each time I saw that neither the man nor the bird was there,
I was plunged into melancholy and sadness. My eyes looked constantly to the heavens and my ears strained to hear the rustling of a wing.

When my love became an unbearable torture, I left my bed one night and ran to the pond, not caring if any of my sisters saw me. To my sheer bliss I saw my love waiting for me. He fluttered his wings, jumping in the air before he left his feathers and held me in his two arms. As we stood face to face with our lips touching he spoke: “I tried in vain to be away from you, but I will vanish and die without you.”

I gazed into his beautiful, sad eyes and the thought that I would not be able to see them night and day made me weep and choke. But Azraq Blue embraced me and dried my tears with his hand.

“Please stop crying, my lovely. I shall be the one to leave my family and come and live with you as a human being, for I cannot live for another instant away from you.”

I squeezed him to me, kissed him and kissed him again, and felt that I was finally in heaven. We agreed that he would knock at our door the next day and introduce himself as a merchant from Basra, asking for my hand.

“See you tomorrow if God wills,” we said to each other, and I hurried back home, wishing that the night would pass quickly. I was woken by a great commotion and then some tapping at my window. It was Azraq, in the form of a bird. I opened my window and with my help he squeezed himself through and fell to the ground with a thud. Once inside he took off his feathers and we embraced each other and he told me that he could not bear to be parted from me, even for the rest of the night. We became like an orange to its navel. As we whispered words of love, I heard my two elder sisters at my door, asking if I was all right, for they had heard someone at my window. I answered them, pretending that I
might have talked in my sleep. Azraq and I froze for a while, until we heard only silence. Then we embraced so strongly that each of us gasped for breath.

Early in the morning, before he left, Azraq asked me, “Do you have a safe place to hide my feathers?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that no one will set eyes on them,” I told him.

“I would like to hide them myself, for these feathers are my power and soul,” he said.

But I laughed, saying, “Don’t worry, no one will put them on and try to fly with them.”

“No human could fly with them, but as I told you, the feathers are my power and my soul. If even one feather is damaged, all of them would be broken and then I would lose my power to fly and …”

I interrupted him. “Then I will be the one who will interfere with your feathers, so you will stay with me for ever and ever.”

He smiled as he hugged me and with great patience he said, “What I mean is that if I lose my power of flight, I will lose my power as a jinni, and I will lose my power to be a man. Then I would soon disintegrate into ashes.”

“Let us hide them in the safest place so you won’t become ashes,” I said playfully, since I was certain that what he feared would never happen. I pointed to a closet. “My father’s closet, where I hide everything which once belonged to our parents, as I fear that my sisters will lose things.”

I took a golden bracelet from my wrist and straightened it and the bracelet became a key. Azraq was so surprised that I said to him, “You see, Azraq, humans can be inventive too!”

We laughed as I opened the closet with the key, and then together we laid the feathers inside, wrapped in one of my coats.
We locked it and twisted the key until it became a bracelet once more and I put it on my wrist.

Azraq then climbed out of the window and, after a short time, there was a knock at our door. One of the maids rushed to tell us, we five sisters, of our visitor. I was the last one to appear. Azraq asked about our parents, I wept and so did my two younger sisters while the elder two sat, poised and steely, looking at Azraq with great suspicion. Azraq then asked who was the oldest of us, and asked for my hand in marriage. I interrupted and asked for a moment with my four sisters. When we were alone, I said: “This man seems to be from a good family, serious, capable and honest. I would like to marry him.”

My two elder sisters weren’t surprised at all; they didn’t even remind me that I had changed my mind about marriage and men, while the two younger sisters exclaimed, “Oh, sister, how happy we are for you! We had a feeling that you would never agree to marry and live with a man, but this beautiful man has changed your mind in one second.”

So I married Azraq Blue according to the rule of God and his Prophet. I wore a dress my bridegroom had presented me with, decorated with so many precious stones that I needed several maids to help me to walk.

My two elder sisters asked why we had never heard of such jewels on our trips to Basra, while my younger sisters said, “Your dress is a slice of heaven.”

Days and nights passed, as I plucked one honeycomb after another, meaning that I was completely immersed in passion and love. But other things did not go as smoothly as our love, because my husband’s brothers never ceased trying to woo him back to them. They appeared at dusk each day and flew around
until midnight, shrieking and screeching the loudest cries, which made Azraq weep.

“I am between two fires,” he would say, “your love and their love. My brothers and sisters insist that I should return to them, fearing that in time I will become a human being and lose my powers as a jinni.”

I felt great pity for him, and I offered him the chance to leave with them, putting my grief and heartache aside. But his answer to me was instant: “I cannot be away from you and so I have decided not to see them again, because being with them causes me sorrow rather than joy.”

My two elder sisters, meanwhile, were eaten up with envy because I had found the man of my life. They never ceased to show their dissatisfaction with everything around them and their unhappiness, blaming me for preferring the company of my husband and resenting him for taking me away from them. I decided to accompany them on a business trip to Basra, but Azraq told me that he could not bear even the distance of a tiny strand of hair to fall between us. My elder sisters threw a tantrum, accusing me of being selfish, and so I advised them to go and look for husbands themselves; this time perfect husbands who would love and care for them, adding that maybe they’d be lucky the third time. My sisters searched high and low for husbands, asking matchmakers, going to the public baths every day, but nobody would marry them. I became accustomed to hearing them cry and sob at night, mingled with the shrieks and strange cries of Azraq’s brothers.