Now it was ibn Tahir’s turn.
“Friends, it’s hard to talk about such incredible things as the three of us experienced last night. I understand you completely if you laugh at us. But everything Suleiman said is the absolute truth. So please, be patient and listen. He’ll continue now.”
His face was utterly serious. There was no trace of humor in his voice. Even so, the fedayeen wondered if the threesome might not be playing some practical joke.
“I’d accuse my own father of lying,” Jafar said, “if he made claims like that. But it seems strange to me that you, ibn Tahir, would join in this kind of nonsense. Go ahead and speak, Suleiman. At least we’ll hear what you were planning to tell us.”
Suleiman sat up on his bed. He looked around menacingly, then he began to speak.
He started at the very beginning, with their ascent of the tower, their encounter with the mace-bearing giants, and Abu Ali ushering them in to meet Sayyiduna. Whenever he missed a detail, Yusuf jumped in to supply it. In this way they described the supreme commander and their strange conversation with him in detail.
The fedayeen followed their narrative with mounting suspense. Yusuf’s interruptions were the best involuntary confirmation of the accuracy of their unusual report.
When Suleiman reached the point where Sayyiduna ordered the three of them to enter the cell containing the three cots, his listeners held their breath. Their eyes were glued to his lips.
Even ibn Tahir listened to him carefully. Instinctively he fingered his chest where Miriam’s tooth marks remained. Now, when he was back in the midst of his everyday life, he became seized by a horror at the memory of that inexplicable nighttime event. For the first time he felt moved by true faith, the kind of faith that experience and reason deny.
Then Suleiman told them how Sayyiduna had given them miraculous pellets that gave them the sense of flying through unknown landscapes. He told them what he had dreamed then, until he had completely lost consciousness.
He reached the point where he woke up in paradise. The faces of the fedayeen glowed and their eyes shone feverishly. They shifted restlessly on their seats. He told them what he had first seen around him. He described the pavilion precisely, without leaving a single detail out. Then he came to a description of the girls.
“Maybe you just dreamt all of this.”
Obeida was trying to relax his extremely taut nerves.
The others were also finding this intense strain on their imaginations to be unbearable. They exchanged glances, breathing heavily. Naim crouched at the head of ibn Tahir’s bed, hunched over and pale with delectable horror. He was getting shivers down his spine in broad daylight, as though he were listening to gruesome ghost stories.
“I’m sure that everything I saw in that place was just as real as you are, sitting around me,” Suleiman continued. “You couldn’t imagine a more beautiful hall. Everything gold and silver. The couches are covered with rugs that are softer than moss. Strewn with pillows that you just sink into. As many choice foods as you could want. Sweet wine that cheers you up and doesn’t rob you of your reason. Everything exactly as it’s written in the Koran. And guys, the houris! Skin like milk and satin. Big, clear eyes. And their breasts, O Allah! Just thinking about them, I start to feel like there’s fire inside of me.”
He described his amorous adventures in detail.
“Oh, if only I could have been there”—the words came from the bottom of Obeida’s heart.
“If you’d so much as touched one of them, I would have ripped your guts out with my bare hands.”
Suleiman’s eyes flashed like a madman’s.
Obeida instinctively drew away.
He had known Suleiman long enough. There really was no joking with him. But he had never seen him as he was at this moment. Something told him that he had changed last night in some dangerous way.
“Those houris are mine! Do you understand? They’re mine now and for all eternity. I’m not giving up a single one of them, not for anything. Oh, my sweet little gazelles! Source of my joy! Spring of my happiness! None of you has any right to want any of them. Allah made them for me. I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be with them forever.”
Each of them sensed this: that Suleiman had become a completely different person overnight. They looked at him distrustfully and almost with fear.
Perhaps Yusuf was the only one who didn’t notice this change, or rather, for whom the change seemed only natural. He understood it instinctively, because a similar transformation had taken place in him.
Suleiman continued describing his experiences with the girls of paradise.
Suddenly Yusuf lost his temper.
“You’re not trying to make us think that you made all nine of the houris your wives in just one night?”
“Why should I have to make you think anything? Didn’t you?”
Yusuf scoffed angrily.
“A serious thing like this, and Suleiman can’t help exaggerating.”
Suleiman bored through him with his eyes.
“Hold your tongue! I’m not exaggerating any more than the Koran does.”
“Then the Koran exaggerates.”
The fedayeen laughed.
Suleiman bit his lip.
“My wives composed a song about my love. Are you going to tell me that the houris lie?”
“Recite it.”
He tried to collect his memory of it, but soon he got stuck.
Yusuf burst out in a loud guffaw and slapped his knees, laughing.
The others laughed with him.
At that point Suleiman went flying like an arrow over ibn Tahir’s bed. He slugged Yusuf in the face with all his might.
Yusuf instinctively reached for the injured area. He stood up slowly, looking stunned. The blood had rushed to his face.
“What? That grasshopper is going to hit me in the face?”
Lightning-fast he lunged and pinned Suleiman to the opposite wall. The sabers hanging on it rattled. Suleiman drew one of them and fixed Yusuf with malevolent eyes.
“Son of a dog! This time it’s to the death.”
Yusuf went white. In an instant all his anger was gone.
But before Suleiman could do anything else, ibn Tahir leapt at him, grabbing the arm that held the saber. Jafar, ibn Vakas and others came to his aid and pried the weapon out of the madman’s hand.
“Are you out of your mind? Last night in paradise by the grace of Sayyiduna, today a massacre among your friends!”
With a firm hand, ibn Tahir sat him back down on his bed.
“And you, Yusuf, what’s the idea of interrupting him while he’s talking? We’re not all made of the same stuff. Each of us lives his life in his own way.”
“You’re right, ibn Tahir,” Jafar said. “Let’s have Suleiman tell his story to the end, then you and Yusuf will have your turns.”
Now they all begged Suleiman to go on. Yusuf stubbornly crossed his arms on his chest and stared at the ceiling. Suleiman cast a scornful look at him, then proceeded to tell the rest of his story.
No one doubted any longer that the threesome had actually been in paradise. They took an interest in the details, and soon each of them became intimately familiar with the place and the girls that Suleiman had visited. Soon they began privately daydreaming about the beautiful houris, and some fell in love with one or the other of them against his will.
“So you woke up in that same dark cell you’d fallen asleep in?”
Naim asked questions like a child.
“That’s right. Everything was just like it had been the night before. Except that when I patted my robe, I felt the bracelet that Halima had given to me in paradise.”
“Why did Sayyiduna take it away from you?”
“Maybe he was afraid I might lose it. But he promised he’d return it to me the next time he sends me to paradise.”