“And have you fallen in love with Miriam?”
“Don’t you ever blurt out anything like that again!” Fatima scolded her too.
“How is he going to be dressed?” Aisha wondered.
Sara grinned broadly.
“Dressed? He’ll be naked, of course.”
Halima put her hands out in front of herself.
“I won’t look at him if he is.”
“Listen!” Shehera suggested. “Let’s compose a poem for him.”
“Good idea! Fatima, go ahead.”
“But we haven’t even seen him yet.”
“Fatima is afraid he won’t be handsome enough,” Sara laughed.
“Don’t push me, Sara. I’ll give it a try. How about this: Handsome fellow Suleiman—came to paradise…”
“Silly!” Zainab exclaimed. “Suleiman is a hero who fought the Turks. It would be better to say: Fearless warrior Suleiman—came to paradise…”
“Now isn’t that poetic!” Fatima bristled. “Funny you didn’t sprain your tongue… Now listen to this: Bold gray falcon Suleiman—came to paradise. Caught sight of lovely Halima—could not believe his eyes.”
“No! Don’t put me in the poem!”
Halima was terrified.
“Silly child! Don’t be so serious. We’re just playing around.”
The girls around Zuleika were more preoccupied. Jada could barely stay on her feet, and Little Fatima retreated to the farthest corner, as though she would be safer there. Asma asked lots of silly questions, while Hanafiya and Zofana were arguing over nothing. Only Rokaya and Habiba maintained some degree of composure.
Zuleika was full of impatient anticipation. The honor of leading her section had gone to her head. She daydreamed about how the unknown, handsome Yusuf would fall in love with her and her alone, disdaining all the others. Among so many maidens, she would be the chosen one. And she deserved it, after all. Wasn’t she the most beautiful, the most voluptuous of them all?
When she had drunk her cup of wine, she grew mellow in a very particular way. She was blind to everything around her. She took up her harp and began to pluck the strings. In her imagination she saw herself as loved and desired. She charmed, she conquered, and without realizing it, she gradually fell in love with the stranger they were awaiting.
Despite all the luxury, everything was bleak and grim around Miriam. The girls in her pavilion were among the shyest and least independent. They would have liked to press close to Miriam and seek support from her. But Miriam was distant from them with her thoughts.
She hadn’t thought that the realization Hasan didn’t love her would affect her so much. And maybe that wasn’t even the real cause of her pain. Worst of all she knew that she was just a means for Hasan, a tool that would help him attain some goal that had nothing to do with love. Calmly, without jealousy, he was handing her over to another for the night.
She knew men. Moses, her husband, had been old and disgusting. But without her ever having articulated it, it was clear to her that he would rather die than allow another man to touch her. Mohammed, her love, had risked and lost his life to get her. When they later sold her in Basra, she never lost sight of the fact that any master who bought her wouldn’t let another man near her, even though she was a slave. She still preserved this faith in herself when she became Hasan’s property. His decision today had shaken the foundations of her self-confidence and humiliated her to the core.
She would have cried if she could have. But it was as though her eyes were no longer capable of tears. Did she hate Hasan? Her feelings were strangely complex. At first it had been clear that she had no choice but to throw herself into Shah Rud. Then she decided to take revenge. That desire faded too, and gave way to profound sorrow. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that Hasan’s behavior had been utterly consistent. His views, full of contempt for everything the masses held sacred and indisputable, his ambivalence about all received knowledge, his absolute freedom of thought and action—hadn’t all these things charmed and irritated her countless times? Those had been words. She herself was too weak to either dare or be able to turn them into actions. Likewise, she hadn’t assumed that he was that powerful.
Now she was beginning to understand this side of him too. In some way he had been inclined toward her, and perhaps he even liked her. She felt she had to respect him. For him, understanding something intellectually was at the same time a commandment to make it happen. His intellectual conclusions were also obligations. How many times had she told him that she was no longer capable of truly loving anyone, that she couldn’t believe in anything, and that she didn’t recognize the existence of universally applicable laws of behavior? She had acted as though she had long since shaken off any prejudices. With his last decision, hadn’t he shown that he believed her? That he respected her?
Nothing was clear to her anymore. No matter what she thought, no matter how much she tried to understand it all, ultimately she was left with the pain, with the knowledge that she had been humiliated, and that for Hasan she was just an object that he could move around however his interests dictated.
Furtively she was drinking more wine than she should and emptying cup after cup. But she felt she was just getting more and more sober. Suddenly she realized that she was actually waiting for someone. Strangely, all that time she hadn’t once thought of ibn Tahir. Hasan had told her that he was exceptionally bright and a poet. Something strange came over her, as though she had been brushed by an invisible wing. She shuddered, sensing the nearness of fate.
She picked up her harp and pulled her fingers across the strings. It groaned, plaintively and longingly.
“How beautiful she is tonight,” Safiya whispered. She glanced toward Miriam.
“When ibn Tahir sees her, he’ll fall in love right away,” Khadija commented.
“How nice that will be,” Safiya grew excited. “Let’s compose a poem for them.”
“Would you like for him to fall in love with her that much?”
“Absolutely.”
Wordlessly the grand dais accompanied Hasan to the top of the tower. Once out on the platform, they noticed a dull glow that attenuated the starlight on the side where the gardens were located. They went with Hasan up to the battlements and looked over the edge.
The three pavilions were awash in a sea of light. They were illuminated both inside and out. Through their glass towers and walls, everything moving inside them could be seen, infinitely reduced in size.
“You’re a master without equal,” Abu Ali said. “I’d say you’ve sworn to take us from one surprise to the next.”
“It’s like magic from the Thousand and One Nights,” Buzurg Ummid murmured. “Even the most serious doubts fade in the face of your abilities.”
“Wait, don’t praise me too soon,” Hasan laughed. “Apparently our youths are still sleeping down there. The curtain hasn’t even gone up yet. We won’t see if the work was worth it until that happens.”
He described the arrangement of the gardens to them, and which of the threesome was in which pavilion.
“It’s completely incomprehensible to me,” Abu Ali said, “how you were able to come up with the idea for this plan. The only explanation I can think of is that you must have been inspired by some spirit. But not by Allah.”
“Oh, for sure it wasn’t Allah,” Hasan replied, smiling. “More like our old friend Omar Khayyam.”
He told his friends about how he had visited him twenty years before in Nishapur, and how he had unwittingly provided him with the inspiration for his experiment of this evening.
Abu Ali was astonished.
“You mean to say you’ve had this plan since then? And you didn’t lose your mind? By the beard of the martyr Ali! I couldn’t have held out for a month if I’d come up with anything so superb. I’d throw myself into making it happen, and I wouldn’t give up until I either succeeded or failed.”