by Elif Shafak
No sound. No movement. Nothing.
All of a sudden, it began to rain. From where I stood, I could see over the slanted walls of the courtyard. Soon the downpour was so hard that the streets turned into rushing rivers and I was completely soaked.
“Damn it,” I said. “Damn! Damn!”
I was considering giving up for the night when I heard a sharp sound over the clatter of rain on the roofs and roads. There was someone in the courtyard.
It was Shams of Tabriz. Holding an oil lamp in his hand, he walked in my direction and stopped only a few steps away from the bush where I was hiding.
“It is a lovely night, isn’t it?” he asked.
Scarcely able to contain my confusion, I gasped. Was there someone else next to him, or was he talking to himself? Did he know I was here? Could he possibly be aware of my presence? My mind was boiling with questions.
Then another thought occurred to me. How could the lamp in his hand keep burning despite the mighty wind and the heavy rain? And as soon as this question crossed my mind, I felt a shiver down my spine.
I remembered the rumors about Shams. He so excelled in black magic, people said, that he could turn anyone into a braying donkey or a blind bat by simply tying a piece of string from that person’s clothes and uttering his evil incantations. Though I had never believed in such nonsense and wasn’t going to start doing so now, as I stood watching the flame of Shams’s lamp flicker under the heavy rain, I couldn’t stay still, I was trembling so.
“Years ago I had a master in Tabriz,” Shams said as he put the lamp on the ground, thus taking it out of my eyesight. “He is the one who taught me there was a time for everything. It is one of the last rules.”
What rules was he talking about? What cryptic talk was this? I had to decide quickly whether I should come out of the bush now or wait until he turned his back to me—except he never did. If he knew I was here, there was no point in hiding. In case he didn’t, though, I had to measure well when to come out.
But then, as if to deepen my confusion, I noticed the silhouettes of the three men waiting under a covering outside the garden wall shift restlessly. They must have been wondering why I hadn’t moved to kill the dervish.
“It is Rule Number Thirty-seven,” Shams continued. “God is a meticulous clockmaker. So precise is His order that everything on earth happens in its own time. Neither a minute late nor a minute early. And for everyone without exception, the clock works accurately. For each there is a time to love and a time to die.”
In that moment I understood that he was talking to me. He knew I was here. He had known it even before he stepped out into the courtyard. My heart started to race. I felt as if all around me the air were being sucked away. There was no use in hiding anymore. And just like that, I stood up and walked out from behind the bush. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started, plunging everything into silence. We stood face-to-face, the killer and the victim, and despite the strangeness of the situation everything seemed natural, almost peaceful.
I pulled out my sword and swung it with all my might. The dervish dodged the blow with a swiftness I did not expect from a man of his size. I was about to swing again when suddenly a rush of movement swirled in the darkness and six men appeared out of nowhere, attacking the dervish with clubs and spears. Apparently the three young men had brought friends. The ensuing battle was so intense that they all toppled to the ground, rolling around, regaining footing, and falling again, breaking spear after spear into splinters.
I stood watching, shocked and furious. Never before had I been reduced to playing witness to a murder I was paid to commit. I was so angry at the three young men for their insolence that I could easily have let the dervish go and fought them instead.
But before long, one of the men started to yell hysterically. “Help! Help us, Jackal Head! He is going to kill us.”
Fast as lightning I threw my sword aside, pulled my dagger out of my belt, and dashed forward. The seven of us knocked the dervish to the ground, and in one swift move I stabbed him in the heart. A single hoarse cry came out of his mouth, his voice breaking at its peak. He didn’t stir again, nor did he breathe.
Together we lifted his body, which was strangely light, and dumped him into the well. Gasping loudly for air, we each then took a step back and waited to hear the sound of his body hitting the water.
It never came.
“What the hell is going on?” said one of the men. “Didn’t he fall in?”
“Of course he did,” another said. “How could he not?”
They were panicking. So was I.
“Maybe he got caught on a hook on the wall,” the third man suggested.
The suggestion made sense. It took the burden of finding an explanation off our shoulders, and we gladly embraced it, though we all knew there were no hooks on the walls of wells.
I don’t know how long we waited there, avoiding one another’s eyes. A cool breeze crossed the courtyard, sprinkling thin, brown willow leaves around our feet. High in the sky above, the dark blue of the morning was just beginning to break into violet. We might have stayed there until long into the day had the back door of the house not opened and a man walked out. I recognized him instantly. It was Mawlana.
“Where are you?” he yelled, his voice heavy with concern. “Are you there, Shams?”
At the mention of his name, all seven of us took to our heels. The six men jumped over the garden walls and disappeared into the night. I remained behind, searching for my dagger, which I found under a bush, covered with mud. I knew I should not linger there, not even a second, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of looking back.
And when I did, I saw Rumi stagger into the courtyard and then suddenly lurch to his left, toward the well, as if guided by an intuition. He leaned forward, peered down, and stood like that for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the semidarkness inside the well. Then he pulled back, fell to his knees, pounded his chest, and let out a terrifying scream.
“They killed him! They killed my Shams!”
I jumped over the wall and, leaving behind the dagger with the blood of the dervish on it, ran as I had never run before.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, AUGUST 12, 2008
Balmy and sunny, it was an ordinary day in August. A day like any other. Ella woke up early in the morning, prepared breakfast for her husband and children, watched them leave for work and chess and tennis clubs, went back to her kitchen, opened her cookbook, and chose the day’s menu:
Spinach Soup with Creamy Mushroom Mash
Mussels with Mustard Mayonnaise
Seared Scallops with Tarragon-Butter Sauce
Garden Salad with Cranberries
Zucchini Rice Gratin
Rhubarb and Vanilla Cream Lattice Pie
It took her all afternoon to cook the dishes. When she was done, she took out her best china. She set the table, folded the napkins, and arranged the flowers. She set the oven timer for forty minutes, so that the gratin could be warm by seven o’clock. She prepared the croutons, put the dressing in the salad, thick and fatty, just as Avi preferred. It occurred to her to light the candles, but she changed her mind upon second thought. It was better to leave the table like this. Like an immaculate picture. Untouched. Unmoving.
Then she grabbed the suitcase she had earlier prepared and left her house. As she walked out, she murmured one of Shams’s rules. “It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’
“Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”
Aladdin
KONYA, APRIL 1248
Blowing hot and cold, changing my mind every passing minute as to how I should behave toward others, three weeks after Shams’s death, I finally mustered the courage to go and talk to my father.
I found him in the library, sitting alone by the firelight, as still as an alabaster statue, shadows leaping across his face.
“Father, can I talk to you?” I asked.
Slowly, hazily, as if swimming back to the shore from a sea of reveries, he looked at me and said nothing.
“Father, I know you think I have a role in Shams’s death, but let me assure you—”
All of a sudden, my father raised his finger, interrupting my words. “Between you and me, son of mine, words have dried up. I have nothing to hear from you and nothing to tell you in return,” he pronounced.
“Please don’t say that. Let me explain,” I begged, my voice shaking. “I swear to God. It wasn’t me. I know the people who did it, but it wasn’t me.”
“My son,” my father interjected again, the sorrow draining out of him, replaced by the chilling calmness of someone who has finally accepted a terrible truth, “you say it wasn’t you, but there is blood on your hem.”
I flinched and instantly checked the ends of my robe. Could it be true? Was there blood on me from that evening? I inspected my hem, and then my sleeves, hands, and fingernails. It all seemed clean. When I raised my head again, I came eye to eye with my father and only then understood the little trap that he had set for me.
By inadvertently checking my hem for blood, I had given myself away.
It is true. I did join them in the tavern that evening. I am the one who told the killer that Shams had the habit of meditating every night in the courtyard. And later that night, when Shams was talking to his killer under the rain, I was one of the six men eavesdropping by the garden wall. And when we decided that we should attack, because there was no going back and the killer was taking things too slowly, I showed them the way into our courtyard. But that’s it. I stopped there. I didn’t take part in the fight. It was Baybars who attacked, and Irshad and others helped him. And when they panicked, Jackal Head did the rest.
Later on, I lived that moment over and over in my mind so many times that it is hard to tell what part is real and what part a figment of my imagination. Once or twice I conjured a memory of Shams escaping from our hands into the pitch-black night, and the image was so vivid I almost believed it.
Though he is gone, there are traces of him everywhere. Dance, poetry, music, and all the things that I thought would vanish once he was gone have stayed firmly planted in our lives. My father has become a poet. Shams was right. When one of the jars was broken, so was the other jar.
My father had always been a loving man. He embraced people of all faiths. He was kind toward not only Muslims but also Christians, Jews, and even pagans. After Shams came into his life, his circle of love became so vast it included even the most fallen of society—prostitutes, drunks, and beggars, the scum of the scum.
I believe he could even love Shams’s killers.
There was, and still is, only one person he could not manage to love: his son.
Sultan Walad
KONYA, SEPTEMBER 1248
Beggars, drunks, prostitutes, orphans, and thieves … He distributes all his gold and silver to criminals. Since that awful night, my father has never been the same. Everyone says he has lost his mind to grief. When asked what he is doing, he tells the story of Imra’ul-Qays, the king of Arabs, who was very well liked, notoriously rich and handsome, but one day, unexpectedly, walked out of his perfect life. Qays put on dervish robes, gave up all his wealth, and from then on wandered from one landscape to another.
“This is what losing your beloved does to you,” my father says. “It dissolves your king-self into dust and brings out your dervish-self. Now that Shams is gone forever, I am gone, too. I am not a scholar or a preacher anymore. I am the embodiment of nothingness. Here is my fana, herein my baqa.”
The other day a ginger-haired merchant who looked like the worst liar on earth knocked on our door. He said he had known Shams of Tabriz way back from his years in Baghdad. Then, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper, he swore that Shams was alive and well, hiding and meditating in an ashram in India, waiting for the appropriate time to emerge.
As he said all this, there wasn’t a trace of honesty on his face. But my father got delirious. He asked the man what he wanted in return for this wonderful news. Without the least bit of shame, the merchant said that as a young boy he had always wanted to become a dervish, but since life had taken him in another direction, he would at least love to have the caftan of a scholar as famous as Rumi. Upon hearing this, my father took out his velvet caftan and handed it to him, just like that.
“But, Father, why did you give your precious caftan to that man when you knew so well that he was lying?” I inquired as soon as the man was gone.
And this is what my father said: “You think a caftan is too high a price to pay for his lie? But my dear son, imagine, if he were telling the truth, if Shams were really alive, I would have given my life!”
Rumi
KONYA, OCTOBER 31, 1260
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans. Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the day Shams and I met in front of the Inn of Sugar Vendors. Every year on the last day of October, I retreat into a solitude that grows in weight day by day. I spend forty days in chilla, thinking of the forty rules. I remember and review each of them, but there in the far reaches of my mind there is only Shams of Tabriz, glittering.
You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?
Deep in the slow whirling of sorrow and longing, I am with Shams every day, every minute. My chest is a cave where Shams is resting. Just as a mountain keeps an echo inside itself, I hold the voice of Shams within. Of the scholar and preacher I once was, not even the smallest speck remains. Love has taken away all of my practices and habits. Instead it has filled me with poetry. And though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words.
Two people have helped me through my hardest days: my elder son and a saint named Saladin, the goldbeater. It was while listening to him work in his small store, beating leaves of gold to perfection, that I had the most wonderful inspiration to put the final touches to the dance of the whirling dervishes. The rhythm emanating from Saladin’s store was the same as the pulse of the universe, the divine rhythm Shams had talked and cared so much about.
In time my elder son married Saladin’s daughter, Fatima. Bright and inquisitive, she reminded me of Kimya. I taught her the Qur’an. She became so dear to me that I started referring to her as my right eye and her sister Hediyya as my left eye. That is the one thing dear Kimya proved to me long ago: that girls are just as good students as boys, if not even better. I arrange sema sessions for women and advise Sufi sisters to continue this tradition.
Four years ago I began to recite The Mathnawi. The first line came to me one day at dawn apropos of nothing, while I was watching the sunlight slice the dark. Ever since then the poems spill out of my lips as if by a force of their own. I do not write them down. It was Saladin who painstakingly wrote out those early poems. And my son made copies of each. It is thanks to them that the poems survive
d, because the truth is, if asked to repeat any one of them today, I don’t think I could. Prose or poetry, the words come to me in flocks and then leave just as suddenly, like migrating birds. I am only the bed of water where they stop and rest on their way to warmer lands.
When I start a poem, I never know beforehand what I’m going to say. It could be long or it could be short. I don’t plan it. And when the poem is over, I’m quiet again. I live in silence. And “Silence,” Khamush, is one of the two signatures I use in my ghazals. The other one is Shams of Tabriz.
The world has been moving and changing at a speed we human beings can neither control nor comprehend. In 1258, Baghdad fell to the Mongols. The one city that prided itself on its fortitude and glamour and claimed to be the center of the world suffered defeat. That same year Saladin died. My dervishes and I had a huge celebration, passing through the streets with drums and flutes, dancing and singing in joy, because that is how a saint should be buried.
In 1260 it was the Mongols’ turn to lose. The Mamelukes of Egypt defeated them. Yesterday’s victors became today’s losers. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of God.
After the death of Saladin, Husam the Student, who has matured so fast and so well along the spiritual path that he is now called Husam Chelebi by everyone, helped me to write down the poems. He is the scribe to whom I dictated the entire Mathnawi. Modest and generous, if anyone asks Husam who he is or what he does, without missing a beat he says, “I am a humble follower of Shams of Tabriz. That’s who I am.”
Little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there’s no place to arrive at. The universe is turning, constantly and relentlessly, and so are the earth and the moon, but it is nothing other than a secret embedded within us human beings that makes it all move. With that knowledge we dervishes will dance our way through love and heartbreak even if no one understands what we are doing. We will dance in the middle of a brawl or a major war, all the same. We will dance in our hurt and grief, with joy and elation, alone and together, as slow and fast as the flow of water. We will dance in our blood. There is a perfect harmony and subtle balance in all that is and was in the universe. The dots change constantly and replace one another, but the circle remains intact. Rule Number Thirty-nine: While the parts change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing ever really changes.