by Elif Shafak
An awkward silence descended on the entire street. Leaves skittered along the sidewalk, and for a moment they were the only things that moved.
“Come on, you lot! Off you go, back to the sermon.” Shams of Tabriz waved his staff, shooing the men away like flies.
They did not all turn and walk away, but they did take a few steps back, swaying unsteadily, puzzled as to what to do next. A few of them were looking in the direction of the mosque as if considering returning. It was exactly then that the harlot mustered the courage to get out from behind the dervish. Fast as a rabbit, she took to her heels, her long hair flying every which way while she scurried into the closest side street.
Only two men attempted to chase her. But Shams of Tabriz blocked their path, swinging his staff under their feet with such suddenness and force that they tumbled over and fell down. A few passersby laughed at the sight, and so did I.
Embarrassed and stupefied, the two men managed to get to their feet again, but by that time the harlot had long vanished and the dervish was walking away, his work here done.
Suleiman the Drunk
KONYA, OCTOBER 17, 1244
Before the commotion I was snoozing peacefully with my back to the tavern wall, and then the racket outside made me nearly jump out of my skin.
“What’s going on?” I screamed as my eyes snapped open. “Did the Mongols attack us?”
There was a ripple of laughter. I turned around and found several other customers making fun of me. Dirty bastards!
“Don’t you worry, old drunk!” yelled Hristos, the tavern owner. “No Mongols coming after you. It’s Rumi passing by with an army of admirers.”
I went to the window and looked out. Sure enough, there they were—an excited procession of disciples and admirers repeatedly chanting, “God is great! God is great!” In the middle of it all was the erect figure of Rumi, mounted on a white horse, radiating strength and confidence. I opened the window, ducked my head out, and watched them. Moving at a pace no faster than a snail’s, the procession came very near. In fact, some of the crowd were so close that I could easily have touched a few heads. Suddenly I had a brilliant idea. I was going to snatch off some people’s turbans!
I grabbed the wooden back scratcher that belongs to Hristos. Holding the window open with one hand and the scratcher in the other, I leaned forward, managing to reach the turban of a man in the crowd. I was just about to pull the turban off when another man inadvertently looked up and saw me.
“Selamun aleykum,” I saluted, smiling from ear to ear.
“A Muslim in a tavern! Shame on you!” the man roared. “Don’t you know wine is the handiwork of Sheitan?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could make a sound, something sharp whizzed by my head. I realized in sheer horror that it was a stone. If I hadn’t ducked at the last second, it would have cracked my skull. Instead it had shot through the open window, landing on the table of the Persian merchant sitting behind me. Too tipsy to comprehend what had happened, the merchant held the stone in his hand, examining it as if it were an obscure message from the skies.
“Suleiman, close that window and go back to your table!” Hristos bellowed, his voice hoarse with worry.
“Did you see what happened?” I said as I staggered back toward my table. “Someone hurled a stone at me. They could have killed me!”
Hristos raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry, but what were you expecting? Don’t you know there are people who don’t want to see a Muslim in a tavern? And here you are displaying yourself, reeking of alcohol, your nose glowing like a red lantern.”
“S-so what?” I stuttered. “Am I not a human being?”
Hristos patted me on the shoulder as if to say, Don’t be so touchy.
“You know, this is exactly why I abhor religion. All sorts of them! Religious people are so confident of having God by their side that they think they are superior to everyone else,” I said.
Hristos did not respond. He was a religious man, but also a skilled tavern owner who knew how to soothe an incensed customer. He brought me another carafe of red wine and watched me as I guzzled it. Outside, a wild wind blew, slamming shut the windows and scattering dry leaves left and right. For a moment we stood still, listening carefully, as if there were a melody to be heard.
“I don’t understand why wine was forbidden in this world but promised in heaven,” I said. “If it’s as bad as they claim, why would they serve it in paradise?”
“Questions, questions …” Hristos murmured as he threw his hands up. “You are always full of questions. Do you have to question everything?”
“Of course I do. That’s why we were given a brain, don’t you think?”
“Suleiman, I have known you for a long time. You are not just any customer to me. You are my friend. And I worry about you.”
“I’ll be fine—” I said, but Hristos interrupted me.
“You are a good man, but your tongue is as sharp as a dagger. That’s what worries me. There are all sorts of people in Konya. And it’s no secret that some of them don’t think highly of a Muslim who has taken to drink. You need to learn to be careful in public. Hide your ways, and watch what you say.”
I grinned. “May we top off this speech with a poem from Khayyám?”
Hristos heaved a sigh, but the Persian merchant who had overheard me exclaimed cheerfully, “Yes, we want a poem from Khayyám.”
Other customers joined in, giving me a big round of applause. Motivated and slightly provoked, I jumped onto a table and began to recite:
“Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think,
And at the same time make it a sin to drink?”
The Persian merchant yelled, “Of course not! That wouldn’t make any sense!”
“Give thanks to Him who foreordained it thus—
Surely He loves to hear the glasses clink!”
If there was one thing these many years of drinking had taught me, it was that different people drank differently. I knew people who drank gallons every night, and all they did was get merry, sing songs, and then doze off. But then there were others who turned into monsters with a few drops. If the same drink made some merry and tipsy and others wicked and aggressive, shouldn’t we hold the drinkers responsible instead of the drink?
“Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why;
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.”
Another round of applause followed. Even Hristos joined the excitement. In the Jewish quarter of Konya, in a tavern owned by a Christian, we, a mixed bunch of wine lovers of all faiths, raised our glasses and toasted together, hard though it was to believe, to a God who could love and forgive us even when we ourselves clearly failed to do so.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, MAY 31, 2008
“Better safe than sorry,” said the Web site. “Check his shirts for lipstick stains, see if he comes home smelling of unfamiliar perfumes.”
This was the first time Ella Rubinstein had taken an online test, titled “How to Tell If Your Husband Is Cheating on You!” Although she found the questions tacky, by now she knew that life itself could occasionally feel like one big cliché.
In spite of her final test score, Ella didn’t want to confront David on this matter. She still had not asked him where he’d been on the nights he hadn’t come home. These days she spent most of her time reading Sweet Blasphemy, using the novel as an excuse to cover up her silence. Her mind was so distracted that it was taking her longer than usual to finish the book. Still, she was enjoying the story, and with every new rule of Shams’s she mulled her life over.
When the children were around, she acted normal. They acted normal. However, the moment she and David were alone, she caught her husband looking at her curiously, as if wondering what kind of wife would avoid asking her husband where he’d spent the night. But the truth was that Ella didn’t want a piece of information she wouldn’t know how to handle. The less she knew about her husband’s flings, the les
s they would occupy her mind, she thought. It was true what they say about ignorance. It was bliss.
The only time that bliss had been disrupted was last Christmas, when a survey from a local hotel arrived in their mailbox, addressed directly to David. Customer service wanted to know whether he was happy with his stays. Ella left the letter on the table, on top of a pile of mail, and that evening she watched him take the letter out of the opened envelope and read it.
“Ah, a guest evaluation form! The last thing I needed,” David said, managing a half smile for her. “We held a dental conference there last year. They must have included all the participants on their customer list.”
She believed him. At least the part of her that didn’t like to rock the boat did. The other part of her was cynical and distrustful. It was that same part that the next day found the hotel’s number and dialed it, just to hear what she already knew: Neither this year nor the one before had they ever hosted a dental conference.
Deep inside, Ella blamed herself. She hadn’t aged well, and she’d gained considerable weight over the last six years. With every new pound, her sexual drive had declined a bit further. The cooking classes rendered it more difficult to shed the extra pounds, though there were women in her group who cooked more often, and better, and still remained half her size.
When she looked back at her life, she realized that rebellion had never suited her. She had never smoked weed with boys behind closed doors, gotten kicked out of bars, used morning-after pills, thrown fits, or lied to her mother. Never cut class. Never had teen sex. All around her, girls her age were having abortions or putting their out-of-wedlock babies up for adoption, while she observed their stories as though watching a TV program on famine in Ethiopia. It saddened Ella that such tragedies were unfolding in the world, but the truth was that she never saw herself as sharing the same universe with those unfortunate ones.
She had never been a party girl, not even as a teenager. She preferred to sit at home and read a good book on a Friday night rather than whoop it up with strangers at some wild party.
“Why can’t you be like Ella?” the mothers in the neighborhood asked their daughters. “See, she never gets herself in trouble.”
While their mothers adored her, the kids themselves saw her as a nerd with no sense of humor. No wonder she wasn’t very popular in high school. Once a classmate told her, “You know what your problem is? You take life so seriously. You’re fucking boring!”
She listened carefully and said she would think about that.
Even her hairstyle hadn’t changed much over the years—long, straight, honey-blond hair that she pulled into an unrelenting bun or braided down her back. She wore little makeup, just a touch of reddish brown lipstick and a moss green eyeliner, which according to her daughter did more to hide than to bring out the gray-blue of her eyes. In any event, she never managed to draw two perfectly curved lines with the eyeliner and often went out with the line on one eyelid looking thicker than that on the other.
Ella suspected that there must be something wrong with her. She was either too intrusive and pushy (with regard to Jeannette’s marriage plans) or too passive and docile (with regard to her husband’s flings). There was an Ella-the-control-freak and an Ella-the-hopelessly-meek. She could never tell which one was about to emerge, or when.
And then there was a third Ella, observing everything quietly, waiting for her time to come. It was this Ella who told her she was calm to the point of numbness but that underneath there was a strangled self, harboring a fast freshet of anger and rebellion. If she kept going like this, the third Ella warned, she was bound to explode someday. It was just a matter of time.
Contemplating these issues on the last day of May, Ella did something she hadn’t done in a long while. She prayed. She asked God to either provide her with a love that would absorb her whole being or else make her tough and careless enough not to mind the absence of love in her life.
“Whichever one You choose, please be quick,” she added as an afterthought. “You might have forgotten, but I’m already forty. And as You can see, I don’t carry my years well.”
Desert Rose the Harlot
KONYA, OCTOBER 17, 1244
Breathless, I ran and ran along the narrow alley, unable to look back. My lungs burning, my chest pounding, when I finally reached the busy bazaar, I dodged behind a wall, almost collapsing. Only then could I muster the courage to look behind me. To my great surprise and relief, there was only one person following me: Sesame. He stopped beside me, out of breath, his hands dangling limply at his sides, his expression bewildered and vexed, unable to comprehend why all of a sudden I had started running like crazy through the streets of Konya.
Everything had happened so fast that it was only in the bazaar that I could put the pieces together. One minute I was sitting in the mosque, absorbed in the sermon, drinking in Rumi’s pearls of wisdom. In my trance I failed to notice that the lad next to me had accidentally stepped on the ends of the scarf covering my face. Before I knew it, the scarf came loose and my turban slid aside, exposing my face and a bit of my hair. I fixed the scarf swiftly and continued listening to Rumi, confident that nobody had noticed anything. But when I raised my eyes again, I saw a young man in the front row looking at me intently. Square face, lazy eye, sharp nose, sneering mouth. I recognized him. He was Baybars.
Baybars was one of those pesky customers none of the girls in the brothel wanted to sleep with. Some men have a way of wanting to sleep with prostitutes and yet at the same time insulting them. He was such a man. Always cracking lewd jokes, he had a terrible temper. Once he beat a girl so badly that even the boss, who loved money more than anything, had to ask him to leave and never come back. But he kept returning. At least for a few more months. Then, for some reason unbeknownst to me, he stopped visiting the brothel, and we didn’t hear from him again. Now there he was, sitting in the front row, having grown a full beard like a devout man but still with the same fierce sparkle in his eyes.
I averted my gaze. But it was too late. He had recognized me.
Baybars whispered something to the man next to him, and then the two of them turned around and stared at me. Next they pointed me out to someone else, and one after another all the men in that row stared in my direction. I felt my face blush and my heart race, but I couldn’t budge. Instead I clung to the childish hope that if I stayed still and closed my eyes, the darkness would engulf us all, leaving nothing to worry about.
When I dared to open my eyes again, Baybars was pushing his way through the crowd toward me. I made a dash for the door, but it was impossible to escape, surrounded as I was by a thick sea of people. In a flash Baybars had reached me, so menacingly close I could smell his breath. Grabbing me by the arm, he said between clenched teeth, “What is a harlot doing here? Don’t you have any shame?”
“Please … please, let me go,” I stammered, but I don’t think he even heard me.
His friends joined him. Tough, scary, confident, disdainful fellows, reeking of anger and vinegar, raining insults on me. Everyone around turned to see what the commotion was about, and a few people tsk-tsked disapprovingly, but nobody intervened. My body as listless as a lump of dough, I meekly let them push me toward the exit. Once we reached the street, I hoped, Sesame would come to my aid, and if worst came to worst, I would run away. But no sooner had we stepped into the street than the men grew more belligerent and aggressive. I realized in horror that in the mosque, out of respect for the preacher and the community, they had been careful not to raise their voices or shove me around, but outside on the street there was nothing to stop them.
I had been through harder things in my life, and yet I doubt if I had ever felt so dejected before. After years of hesitation, today I had taken a step toward God, and how had He responded? By kicking me out of His house!
“I should never have gone there,” I said to Sesame, my voice cracking like thin ice. “They’re right, you know. A harlot has no place in a mosque or a church o
r in any of His houses.”
“Don’t say that!”
When I turned around to see who had said this, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was him, the wandering hairless dervish. Sesame broke into a wide smile, delighted to see him again. I lurched forward to kiss his hands, but he stopped me midway. “Please don’t.”
“But how can I thank you? I owe you so much,” I beseeched.
He shrugged and looked uninterested. “You owe me nothing,” he said. “We are indebted to no other than Him.”
He introduced himself as Shams of Tabriz and then said the strangest thing ever: “Some people start life with a perfectly glowing aura but then lose color and fade. You seem to be one of them. Once your aura was whiter than lilies with specks of yellow and pink, but it faded over time. Now it is a pale brown. Don’t you miss your original colors? Wouldn’t you like to unite with your essence?”
I looked at him, feeling utterly lost in his words.
“Your aura has lost its shine because all these years you have convinced yourself that you are dirty inside and out.”
“I am dirty,” I said, biting my lip. “Don’t you know what I do for a living?”
“Allow me to tell you a story,” Shams said. And this is what he told me:
One day a prostitute passed by a street dog. The animal was panting under the hot sun, thirsty and helpless. The prostitute immediately took off her shoe and filled it with water from the nearest well for the dog. Then she went on her way. The next day she ran into a Sufi who was a man of great wisdom. As soon as he saw her, he kissed her hands. She was shocked. But he told her that her kindness toward the dog had been so genuine that all her sins had been pardoned there and then.
I understood what Shams of Tabriz was trying to tell me, but something inside me refused to believe him. So I said, “Let me assure you, even if I fed all the dogs in Konya, it wouldn’t be enough for my redemption.”
