As Zaytuna watched them she realized her mouth was open in shock at the exchange and shut it. She saw the girl blush deeply at his response, bow her head, and move back from them on her knees before standing and turning away to go into the courtyard. This was the girl. The girl from Taraz he’d blushed over a few days earlier.
Zaytuna was stuck, crouched there in front of him, one part of herself searching the other to see what it was feeling. She wasn’t sure. Jealous, certainly. She dug around for it and there it was. She was afraid he would abandon her. She scolded herself. Woman, what had made you think this man would always be here? What made you think you could have a man to love without…. And with those words, she saw him, her Mustafa, in her mind’s eye, on top of her in a sweaty black qamis, and she shuddered, inwardly scrambling, kicking and pushing the image out of her mind. She felt her chest tighten the way it does when tears are coming and she forced herself to breathe to stop them. She spoke, her voice cracking with the effort, “Mustafa, I do love you, but I cannot marry you.”
He looked at her, seeing her near to tears and fighting it and reached out to brush the back of his fingers against her face, not caring who saw it, and said, “Shhh. I understand. I just thought maybe you were leaving your asceticism behind. You...”
She cut him off, “No, it’s not that. You know what it is. Don’t make me say it.”
He did not speak.
She admitted it to him, “I’m afraid I will lose you forever if I don’t marry you.”
“Never.”
“Will you always be my friend, my brother?”
He held her eyes with his own to make sure she saw the truth in it, and said, “Yes.”
She said, her tears coming as she let her fear out, “And no one will ever come between us.”
“No.”
She asked, laughing a little, through her tears, “Not even that pink-cheeked girl?”
He blushed, looking out to the courtyard after YingYue, and leaned forward to hold her, awkwardly bringing her to him for the last time like that, still in love with her for her stupid anger, her stupid jealousy, her stupid everything, saying, “No one will ever come between us.”
She held him in return for just a moment, allowing herself to feel his shoulders against her own, his head on her shoulder, then released him and pushed herself up.
He stood, wiping his eyes, and moved close to her to bump her shoulder with his own, but she had already turned away from him toward a large boy coming across the courtyard, smiling. No, Mustafa saw, he was grinning.
When he saw Zaytuna, he picked up and ran to her, “Auntie Zaytuna!”
She grasped him, smiling back, searching his face, “Tell me, Yu.. Abdelghafur!”
“I like the name, Auntie Zaytuna, Uncle asked me what name I wanted and I said Abdelghafur, Servant of The Forgiver. He said that was the right name for me.”
“Who? Who told you?”
He pointed toward the kitchen and she saw a tall man duck out from its doorway, Uncle Nuri. He was here.
Mustafa said, “With everything that’s happened, I forgot to say.”
“Oh it doesn’t matter,” she was about to call out to her Uncle, then remembered YingYue’s scolding look and hurried out to him instead. “Uncle Nuri!” She reached him and grabbed both his hands kissing them and bringing them to her face before he could pull them away and take her in his arms.
“My daughter, Zaytuna.” Pulling back, he said, “Let me look at you.”
“You are as beautiful as your mother. I see her light on your face!”
“Oh Uncle…”
“I spoke with your boy there, Abdelghafur. He told me everything. Hilal asked him a few questions about kitchen work and he could tell the boy is skilled. The housekeeper where he lived taught him well. He’ll have a place to sleep and eat here and he’ll work under Hilal.”
“You told him God can forgive him?”
“Of course. The Prophet said nothing is dearer to God than a repentant child. The boy will live a life of service with us. That should put his heart at ease over time. But he knows a boy died because he allowed the animal within him to attack. I asked him if he wants to learn how to control it.” Nuri laughed, “He doesn’t know what he’s got himself into, but he agreed to it.” He smiled, opening his arms out to the sky, “Leave him with us long enough and he’ll repent from everything other than God!”
She laughed, “Insha’Allah! Sooner than I, no doubt!”
He took her hand, “Now you, come over here with me. We have to talk.”
“Am I in trouble?”
He winked at her, “Yes.”
“Truly?”
“A little, but it’s good trouble.”
He took her to a shaded spot in the courtyard and they sat down on the reed mats laid out, leaning against the wall. She could see YingYue from there, fixing the weave on some of the mats in the corner with soft straw. He saw where she was looking, then looked for Mustafa, still in the reception hall.
“So will you accept Mustafa?”
“No Uncle, I can’t.”
“Your mother also had no time for men.”
“Uncle, it’s not like that.”
“You think I don’t know what it’s like? I’ve never known one of my sisters here to be shy about what men have done to them. I wouldn’t have time for men, either. But I thought, maybe Mustafa, you grew up with him. He’s a kind man. He takes time to observe himself, to control his animal soul. And he loves you.”
“I can’t.”
“I understand, little one.”
She put her hand on his in thanks, saying, “Oh Uncle, only you could call me ‘little’, you are taller than I.”
Then she looked up at him, asking, “Uncle, I feel different from how I did before. Something happened. Uncle Abu al-Qasim did something to me.”
“I heard. I can see.”
“I don’t know how, I’m not even sure, but I think I feel like I accept what has happened. All of it. My father. My mother. What I saw. I know it happened to her, but it happened to us. I don’t understand it, somehow I am grateful for everything. But my gratitude feels like a betrayal to them, to myself.” She said, thinking of the old woman at the cemetery, “I know I need to just keep stepping out to this gratitude. I know I need to trust. Maybe then I could find my way to Mustafa. I do love him. I just can’t see my way to him now.”
He nodded.
“I’ve changed, but I’ve not changed. I’m still angry. I still miss her. If anything I miss her more. I never knew her as she was.”
“You are changing, little one, but this takes time. Everyone at their own pace. You have only tasted an infinitesimal drop of the ocean. You stand before the gate of the Grateful. You stand before the gate of the Accepter. You stand before the gate of the Lover. It is up to you whether or not you find a way through those gates. And you will not find a way to true witnessing as long as a single vein remains standing in your body. You must step ahead towards it.”
“What if I cannot do it?”
He laughed lightly, “Do you want me to send you to your Uncle Abu al-Qasim for a scolding?”
She did not laugh with him. He was not truly laughing. She saw in his eyes that she should be afraid and she was. The gravity of her situation settled in on her, closing in on her chest, making it difficult to breathe. Would she put the chains back around her neck or let them go and step forward into love? Her heart beat right up into her throat. She tried to swallow it down, but her mouth was suddenly dry. She sat perfectly still but within she was a child, flailing about, trying to push love away; until another part of herself pulled it to her, holding love out to her. It’s not what you want, it’s what you need. She stopped writhing and pushing and looked at it. She reached out and took love, still afraid. She held love in her hands, not knowing if she held it right. If she might drop it. Harm love somehow. Ruin everything. That other part of herself spoke. Tell God you are afraid. And thank Him. She couldn’t find a way to
say she was afraid, but she could at least hold her fear and the love she feared out to Him. So she held out what He was forcing her to carry, her commitment to carry love without even knowing what that meant, her fear, all of it, and took one step forward, making herself say aloud, “Alhamdulilah.”
Nuri saw and said, “Good. The fearful one runs from her Lord to her Lord.”
Her eyes were cast down, still ashamed, “Yes, Uncle.”
He lifted her chin so she looked up at him, “Now, none of that, Zaytuna. You’ll correct yourself to the end of your days. Love means tearing down all the veils and revealing all the secrets. Learn to speak from that voice, one breath at a time. Speak, even if it lands you in the dung heaps.” He laughed, “As God is my witness, I have!”
She laughed with him, but was still unsure. They sat in silence until a compulsion to ask a question she had always been too afraid to ask grew too strong to resist. At the same time, as her heart turned to the question, she felt certain of the answer, a warm wave wash in and settled within her and around her. There was no need to ask except that she was as unsure of certainty as she was of the love she felt right then. So the need to ask and the certainty pulled at her, one exhausting her under its weight, the other light, drawing her softly to it, until she finally gave in to the exhaustion, the warmth left her, and she asked him, her eyes filling with tears, “Did she love us, Uncle?”
He sighed, sorely disappointed that she still needed to ask that question, that she gave in to asking it rather than letting it go and trusting all that had come before. He answered anyway, “She loved you with all her heart, little one. I’ll tell you this now. She was sorry you were so afraid. She couldn’t stop what was happening to her. But, let’s be clear, she would not have even if she could have. This path is abandoning everything other than God. She told me about a woman, in one of the villages you stopped in for a few months. The woman offered to take you and Tein, raise you two as her own, so your mother would be free and you two wouldn’t have to face such hardships. Your mother said she was a good woman. She had no children of her own and you two loved her. The woman let you all stay in her house during those months, not in the animal hold and the woman even dressed you in clothes she made especially for you.”
Zaytuna gasped, “I remember her. Auntie Hawwa! I did love her. She put food right in my mouth. I remember that. I sat in her lap and she put food right in my mouth. I was never hungry. And I remember the qamis she made for me. It was so beautiful. It was yellow, even though Muslims aren’t supposed to wear that colour. I just realized now, of course, she was Christian. She made it from one of her own robes. Is that why mother didn’t leave us with her, because she was Christian?”
He shook his head.
“But she would have been free if she had.”
“How could she be free without you and Tein? You were what God wanted from her.”
He paused, then said, modulating his voice to penetrate her heart, “Your mother’s love led you to this moment, to accept that you were loved completely by her and to let her go to take hold of Love Itself. Every lover in this world dies. Divine Love crushes everything in its path. Find your nourishment and healing with The Lover Himself.”
She felt the wave come again, warmly, softly, and envelop her, then turn inward to saturate her, each cell falling into its embrace, one by one, until it held her completely. Then she felt it distinctly, humming within her, her mother’s love, her mother’s fierceness, her hold on her. She tried to grasp it to her, clenching her hands, but it was like warm honey and flowed through her fingers. She loosened her fingers as her mother’s love flowed through them, one by one. It was as if she had been born with her hands gripped tight, and they were only now, twenty-seven years later, being forced to release, each muscle being made to lengthen where it had grown short from disuse. The pain was excruciating, but she did not scream. Instead, she spoke from where she was, for now, saying to him from that voice, “You were there when she walked into the reed bed and cut her feet.”
He said, “No. I found her afterwards. They say she called out to God, “Labayk, Here I am, God!” Then she wandered into the freshly cut bed. The reeds were as sharp as swords. People tried to stop her, but they were too far away to reach her in time. When I found her she had already lost so much blood. Someone had bound her feet with rags, but I saw that she would die. It was beautiful. She never came out of her state. She returned to her Lover awash in His love.”
She felt the horror at her mother’s death but believed, for the first time, she didn’t know how, that it had not been cruel.
He said, “I prayed then and there that God would give me such a beautiful death.”
Not wanting to lose him, but knowing that it was not up to her, Zaytuna said, “May God accept your prayer.”
She felt the warmth of her tears on her cheeks, “Uncle Nuri?”
“Hmm?”
“I only want to be on the side of God’s Love.”
Nuri replied, “My daughter, Love has no side.”
Coming in 2020
The Jealous: A Sufi Mystery
A woman’s howl of pain echoed through the courtyard. “She’s killed him!” Her husband’s face was twisted with terror, staring at something that was not there, looking at the space just over his chest, grasping at his left arm as if to wrest some unseen force away. Saliha gasped, “A jinn! God protect us from evil things!”
When a distinguished scholar dies at the Barmakid hospital in Baghdad, nearly everyone points the finger at his slave Mu’mina, as the one who called a demon to kill him. Tein, a former frontier fighter turned investigator with the Grave Crimes Section, has no time for religion, let alone jinn, and sets out to prove her innocent. But Ammar, Tein’s superior and old wartime friend, has already pushed her case before the Police Chief’s court where she’s sure to be executed or condemned to rot in the prisons built into the damp walls of Baghdad’s Round City.
With the help of his twin sister, Zaytuna, his childhood friend, Mustafa, and Zaytuna’s friend, the untamable Saliha, Tein plunges into a dangerous investigation that takes them into the world of talisman-makers and seers, houses of prostitution and gambling, and the fractious secular and religious court systems, all in an effort to turn back the tragic circumstances set in motion by Ammar’s destructive fear of a girl horribly wronged.
The Lover Page 28