Layla and Majnun

by Nizami

  Ibn Salam, the happiest of men, gave his caravan the signal to begin the long journey home. His donkeys and camels set off at a brisk pace, for they were returning without their loads. And although Ibn Salam had spent a veritable fortune on gifts for his bride’s family, he did not regret it for a second. After all, was not the most precious, the most priceless treasure in the universe now his?

  The litter that had been prepared for Layla was as sumptuous on the inside as it was ornate on the outside. Borne aloft by camels and tended by footservants and flunkeys, Layla was treated like a princess: she was told that during the journey she had only to clap her hands and the caravan would be brought to a halt so that she might get out to stretch her legs; she had only to cough and enough iced sherbet would be brought to quench the thirst of an army; she had only to yawn and a pavilion of pure silk would be erected so that she might sleep. But she desired none of these things.

  When they finally arrived at Ibn Salam’s camp, he turned to her and said, ‘Dearest heart, everything here belongs to you. What is mine is yours: my kingdom lies at your command.’

  And Layla’s response? Well, suffice to say that her response was such that Ibn Salam’s happiness quickly began to cloud over; his heart, which had once shone like the sun with joy, now became veiled with a darkness that seemed to intensify with each passing day. She would not eat, she could not sleep, and she would not allow him into her bed. What was this? For so long he had pursued her and now, now that the treasure was almost in his grasp, the key to the casket was denied him. His trusted courtiers counselled patience and forbearance. And hope. He tried as hard as he could to please her, if only to understand why she was refusing to please him, but it was in vain. Nothing could be read in his dear wife’s eyes but tears, and each night that fell found him sleepless and alone.

  So frustrated did Ibn Salam become that he thought he might even take her by force. After all, he asked himself, is she not my wife? Is it not my right? Who knows, perhaps that is what she expects? And so he stopped trying to win her over with kindness and resorted to more forceful action. But again he failed. In trying to pluck the fruit, he only scarred his hands on the thorn; in his rush to savour the sweetness, the only thing he was allowed to taste proved more bitter than wormwood. For as soon as he reached out his hand to touch her, Layla sank her teeth into his arm and scratched at his face until both of them were covered in his blood.

  ‘I swear to God that if you try that once more,’ she cried, ‘you will regret it for the rest of your life — that is, for what is left of your life! I have promised my Creator that I will not submit to your demands. You can slit my throat with your sword, if you like, but you cannot take me by force!’

  There was nothing Ibn Salam could do. Deeply in love with her, he did not want to go against her wishes. He said to himself, ‘Even if she is not in love with me, at least she is here in my home. True, I may look but I must not touch. So be it! I would rather be allowed to look but not touch than not have her here with me at all. At least I can gaze upon her beautiful face whenever I wish.’

  Then he knelt beside her, took her hand and said humbly, ‘Forgive me, my darling. I beg only to be allowed to look at you; to ask for more would be theft, and I am no common thief.’

  But although Layla agreed, allowing Ibn Salam only to look at her whenever he wished, not once did she return his looks. While his eyes sought hers, her eyes sought only Majnun. She listened to the murmurs of the wind in case it brought news from him; she watched the sunbeams dance in case a single mote that had been in his presence might come her way, bearing his scent. Sometimes, she would throw back the curtains at the entrance to her tent and look out at the night sky; then her soul would escape for a while and she would forget herself. Her hours were filled with thoughts of Majnun and she lived in hope of receiving a message from him. One day soon, she would say. One day soon …

  Chapter 28

  Majnun knew nothing of Layla’s marriage to Ibn Salam; even after an entire year had passed, he was none the wiser. Love had turned him into a blind and drunken nomad, stumbling from place to place with no idea where he was going. Sorrow had emaciated him and sallowed his skin, and he grew worse by the hour. But for a sickness such as his — the sickness of love — there was no cure.

  One evening saw him lying, exhausted as always, beneath the overhanging blossoms of a thorn-bush. He did not see the rider approach him, nor did he hear the rider’s camel, until he was almost upon him. The rider, a swarthy man in a coal-black cloak, dismounted and stood towering above Majnun like some monstrous black demon. His voice was as intimidating as his appearance. He kicked Majnun in the shin and boomed:

  ‘Hey, you there! Your idolatry has cut you off from the world and left you unaware of what is happening. But let me tell you this: you have dedicated your heart to Layla in vain. You idiot! Did you really expect her to remain faithful? Did you really think that she would wait? Do you still hope for light where there is only darkness?

  ‘How you fool yourself! The shining beacon of innocence and love that you think you perceive from afar is but an illusion, a trick of the light. Her love for you exists only in your imagination; in her eyes you are nothing!’

  Majnun opened his mouth to speak but the stranger cut in, louder and more harshly this time.

  ‘You poor misguided fool! Don’t you realise that she has deceived you? You have given your heart to her, and she has given her heart to the enemy!

  ‘She has forgotten you, Majnun, and she has scattered her memories of you to the wind. For she has been given in marriage to another man — a marriage that she was only too glad to accept. Now her thoughts are all for him, for his kisses, his lovemaking, the warmth of his loving arms, the hardness of his rugged body, the beauty of his hidden treasure!

  ‘She is forever lost in thoughts of pleasures of the flesh while you are lost in your own grief and suffering. Can that be right? Can that be fair?

  ‘Look at the ever-widening gulf that separates you and judge for yourself: why should you go on caring for her when it is clear that she no longer cares for you?’

  Majnun felt as though a thousand serpents had buried their fangs in his soul. He opened his mouth to cry out for mercy, but the black demon continued.

  ‘Women are women, Majnun. Did you really expect her to be any different? They are all alike, fickle and capricious, two-faced and duplicitous. She is like the rest of her sex, and the rest of her sex are like her.

  ‘Yesterday, you were a hero in her eyes; today, you are the devil in disguise! Yesterday, you were her everything; today, you are nothing. True, women have passions as we do, but theirs are pursued solely out of self-interest: there is hypocrisy and deceit in everything they do.

  ‘Shame on you for trusting her in the first place! Can one ever trust a woman? Trust a woman and she will repay your trust with torture. And you will have only yourself to blame!

  ‘Why? Because a man who trusts a woman deserves to be tortured; a man who trusts a woman and believes that she will remain faithful is more stupid than she is, and thus deserves to suffer!

  ‘After all, what is a woman anyway? A woman is nothing but a cesspit of falsehood and vanity, viciousness and mendacity.

  ‘True, on the surface she is a haven of tranquillity; dig deeper, however, and you find a churning maelstrom of trouble and turmoil. As your enemy, she corrupts the whole world and turns it against you; as your friend, she corrupts your own soul. If you say “Do this!”, you can be certain that she will not do it; if you say “Don’t do this!”, you can be certain that she will go to the ends of the earth to do it! When you suffer, she is happy; when you are happy, she is in hell. That is how women are, my friend, and you would do well to remember it.’

  As the dark stranger’s words came to an end, a terrible moan of despair rose from the depths of Majnun’s soul. He fell back and, as he fell, his head hit a rock so hard that blood sprayed like a fountain and coloured the sand beneath him bright crimson. He l
ay there unconscious, his lips still rounded in a silent scream.

  Whether man or jinn, the rider felt pity for Majnun. Somewhat ashamed of the effect of his words on the madman, he crouched next to the crumpled body until Majnun regained consciousness.

  Then, in a voice much softer than before, he started to beg Majnun’s forgiveness: ‘Please listen to me, I implore you! Everything I told you was a lie. It was a sick joke, nothing more. Layla has neither deceived nor betrayed you. And she has most certainly not forgotten you. How could she?

  ‘As for her husband, well, he is her husband in name alone: they have been married a whole year and not once has she let him near her.

  ‘Yes, she is married to him, but she remains faithful to you, and to you alone. She has confined herself to her tent and there she suffers, nursing a broken heart and longing only for you. She has no one else in the whole world, and not a single second passes when she does not think of you and your love for her.

  ‘How could she forget you? Even if you were separated by a thousand years, she would not forget you!’

  Majnun listened with rapt attention to the stranger’s words. But was he telling the truth? They were the very words he wanted to hear, but were they spoken in sincerity? Yet, how they soothed his aching heart!

  He began to weep and, as he sat there in the dust with tears streaming down his cheeks, he looked like a little lost boy, like a tiny bird whose wings have been broken by sticks and stones. There was nowhere he could go, nothing he could do. Even the verses that flowed from his lips seemed futile. What good are verses, he thought, when the one for whom they are meant is never likely to hear them?

  Chapter 29

  Majnun dragged himself along like a wounded animal. Grief had emaciated him; there was hardly a breath of life left in his whole body. The only picture in his mind was that of Layla; it was her face that he saw whenever he closed his eyes, and it was her image that remained whenever he opened them.

  He longed to speak to her, but how? Knowing that he would never be able to recite his verses to her in person, he engaged the wind as his messenger. As he sang his haunting songs of love, the wind carried his words away … but without response.

  The wine of unrequited love is as bitter as wormwood, but so great was Majnun’s passion that he could not refuse to drink. And as he drank, so his verses continued to flow:

  You are the cause of my lingering death,

  yet while I live,

  My passion for you grows, and I forgive.

  You are the sun while I am the star of night:

  You rise and put to shame my waning light.

  Your eyes are the envy of each candle flame;

  The roses bloom and blossom in your name.

  Be parted from you? Never! I confess

  My love and devotion until death;

  Tormented, I remain a target for your blows:

  Yours, when I die, will be the blood that flows

  Chapter 30

  And Majnun’s father, the old Sayyid — what had become of him during this time?

  Age and sorrow had bent his back and turned his hair white. He was like Jacob robbed of his beloved Joseph, only worse: Jacob at least had other sons to console him in his grief, but Majnun’s father had only Majnun and was thus destined to suffer alone. He could see his own fate only too well, and it was blacker than the blackest night, a night without end.

  And his days were as dark as his nights. He would sit in a corner of his tent, waiting for the signal that would herald his departure to that last, eternal resting place. He knew that the signal would not be long in coming, for already he had passed the three signposts of Sorrow, Weakness and Old Age.

  There was only one tie that still bound him to the world, and that tie was Majnun. The old Sayyid was not afraid of death. But he was afraid that he might die without seeing his son, the light of his eyes, just one more time before he departed. He had little to leave him — worldly possessions counted for nothing in his eyes — but it grieved him to think that the little he did have might go to a stranger rather than to his own flesh and blood.

  And so he resolved to find Majnun and talk to him one last time. Perhaps he would be able to make the boy see sense; perhaps he would be able to persuade him to detach his soul from the desert, to rescue his heart from his obsession.

  The hope of seeing Majnun once more was the rock upon which his fragile existence now depended; it was the rope that bound him tenuously to the life of this world. And so, staff in hand, he set out in the company of two young men from his tribe, confident that his Lord would lead him to his goal.

  The journey was a tortuous one, even for the youths. They crossed vast plains that baked in the sun’s fierce heat. They encountered desolate mountain passes beneath towering volcanic peaks. They were bitten by mosquitoes and desert midges, and their feet were blistered from the scorching sand. From oasis to oasis they moved, resting overnight and asking every passing stranger for news of Majnun.

  After several weeks, it seemed that they would never reach their goal. But finally, just as the old Sayyid feared that he would expire from the heat and the dust and the hopelessness of it all, they met an old Bedouin who had news of Majnun.

  ‘You are looking for Majnun?’ he said, his eyes widening. ‘Then I can help you, for I know where he is! It is a God-forsaken place, a desert cave that resembles a pit in the flames of hellfire itself. I would not advise you to go there — unless, that is, you are unafraid of death!’

  The old Sayyid’s young companions begged him to turn back, but he would have none of it. And so they set off once more, this time in the direction given to them by the old Bedouin, and after a full day’s journey they arrived at their destination.

  The place was so desolate, so bleak, that it made the travellers weep. And when they found Majnun — or, at least, the creature they assumed was Majnun — they had cause to weep some more. The old Sayyid hardly recognised him as human, let alone as his own flesh and blood. Majnun was no more than a few thin bones, held together by filthy rags. He moved on all fours like a beast of the field, like some grotesque spirit from the underworld that rises from time to time in order to haunt the world of men. His hair matted, his skin caked with grime, he writhed in the dust like a serpent on the edge of death. It was a sight to move the hardest of hearts.

  Overwhelmed by love and pity, by compassion and sorrow, the old Sayyid fell to his knees and clasped his son to his breast. Tenderly, he ran his fingers over his face, wiping away the dust and the dirt with his own tears. Majnun looked up at his father, yet he did not see him. Who was this old man and for whom was he weeping? He stared into his father’s face but did not recognise him. How was he to recognise his father when he could not even recognise himself? He looked the old man in the eye and said, ‘Who are you? Where are you from? What do you want from me?’

  ‘I have been searching for you all the time, my son’, replied the old Sayyid.

  When Majnun heard his father’s voice, he recognised at last who the stranger was. He fell forward into the old man’s arms and began to weep uncontrollably. The old Sayyid kissed his son’s cheeks and pressed him so hard to his breast that his heart was fit to burst. For several tearful minutes, they remained in each other’s arms.

  When they had both regained their composure, the old Sayyid took from his bag a cloak of the softest silk, a fine pair of leather shoes and a turban of white damask. It was not fitting that his son should walk around like one of the living dead, like a corpse resurrected in nakedness from the grave on the Day of Judgement; something clearly had to be done. Majnun, for his part, cared nothing for clothes, but in obedience to his father he put them on.

  Then the old Sayyid sat his son down and began to speak with him kindly, but firmly.

  ‘Dearest heart!’ he said, ‘What kind of place is this in which to rest your head? Have you really chosen this hell as your hiding place? Is this your way of asking Fate to finish you off, to give your body up to wild be
asts once you have died so that they may pick at your bones and devour your flesh?

  ‘I beg you, escape while there is still time. Even the town dogs have a better life than you have here.

  ‘Have you really come so far for so little? Believe me, nothing will come of running away; run until the day you die and still you will get nowhere. What use is all this suffering? What good does it do? Who does it help? Do you want to undo yourself completely?

  ‘You must try to overcome your grief; if not, it will overcome you. It will consume you completely, for you are not invincible.

  ‘For too long you have rebelled. Enough is enough! You have to learn to accept things as they are: the world will not change on your account, especially if you turn your back on it. Why do you live among beasts in this wilderness? Why do you hide away in this foul cave, a demon poet feasting on his own sorrow?

  ‘Try to tear your mind away from all this; try to think of something else, something trivial and of no consequence. Laugh and joke and be happy; yes, it will be false at first but soon the laughter will become real! Indulge yourself, lose yourself a little in the pleasures of the world.

  ‘And why not? That is life. Life blows hot and cold and you must learn to accommodate it. And whether its promises are true or false, you must learn to enjoy each moment as it comes. You must seize the day, for tomorrow is not to be trusted. Enjoy what you have now! Reap what you have sown now! For today is your day: tomorrow belongs to death, and to death alone.

  ‘Nothing counts but what you have achieved so far: a woman can wear only the clothes she possesses; a man can reap only what he has sown. If you hope to achieve greatness in life, you must begin today.

  ‘You must treat life as though this were your first day and also your last. Behave as though death were at your door this very moment; then, when death does arrive, you will have no fear. For only those who “die” before they die may hope to escape death’s jaws.’