“Me? Oh, I journey just out of curiosity, Mirza Esther.”
“Just curiosity! Listen to him! Young man, do not ever deprecate the passion called curiosity. Where would danger be without it, or beauty either?”
I failed to see much connection among the three things, and again began to wonder if I was talking to someone slightly divanè. I knew that old people could sometimes get wonderfully disjointed in their conversations, and so this one seemed when she said next:
“Shall I tell you the saddest words I ever heard?”
In the manner of all old people, she did not wait for me to say yes or no, but went right on:
“They were the last words spoken by my husband Mordecai (alav ha-sholom). It was when he lay dying. The darshan was in attendance, and other members of our little congregation, and of course I was there, weeping and trying to weep with quiet dignity. Mordecai had made all his farewells, and he had said the Shema Yisrael, and he was composed for death. His eyes were closed, his hands folded, and we all thought he was peacefully slipping away. But then, without opening his eyes or addressing anybody in particular, he spoke again, quite clearly and distinctly. And what he said was this …”
The widow pantomimed the deathbed occasion. She closed her eyes and crossed her hands on her bosom, one of them still holding her dirty slipper, and she leaned her head back a little, and she said in a sepulchral voice, “I always wanted to go there … and do that … but I never did.”
Then she stayed in that pose; evidently I was expected to say something. I repeated the dying man’s words, “I always wanted to go there … and do that …” and I asked, “What did he mean? Go where? Do what?”
The widow opened her eyes and shook her slipper at me. “That was what the darshan said, after we had waited for some moments to hear more. He leaned over the bed and said, ‘Go to what place, Mordecai? To do what thing?’ But Mordecai said no more. He was dead.”
I made the only comment I could think to make. “I am sorry, Mirza Esther.”
“So am I. But so was he. Here was a man in the very last flicker of his life, lamenting something that had once piqued his curiosity, but he had neglected to go and see it or do it or have it—and now he never could.”
“Was Mordecai a journeyer?”
“No. He was a cloth merchant, and a very successful one. He never traveled farther from here than to Baghdad and Basra. But who knows what he would have liked to be and do?”
“You think he died unhappy, then?”
“Unfulfilled, at least. I do not know what it was he spoke of, but oh! how I wish he had gone there while he was alive, wherever it was, and done whatever it was.”
I tried tactfully to suggest that it could not matter to him now.
She said firmly, “It mattered to him when it mattered most. When he knew the chance was gone forever.”
Hoping to make her feel better, I said, “But if he had seized the chance, you might be sorrier now. It may have been something—something less than approvable. I have noticed that sinful temptations abound in these lands. In all lands, I suppose. I myself once had to confess to a priest for having too freely followed where my curiosity led me, and—”
“Confess it, if you must, but do not ever abjure it or ignore it. That is what I am trying to tell you. If a man is to have a fault, it should be a passionate one, like insatiable curiosity. It would be a pity to be damned for something paltry.”
“I hope not to be damned, Mirza Esther,” I said piously, “as I trust the Mirza Mordecai was not. It may well have been out of virtue that he let that chance go by, whatever it was. Since you cannot know, you need not weep for—”
“I am not weeping. I did not broach the matter to sniffle over it.”
I wondered why, then, she had bothered to broach it. And, as if in reply to my silent question, she went on:
“I wanted you to know this. When you come at last to die, you may be devoid of all other urges and senses and faculties, but you will still possess your passion of curiosity. It is something that even cloth merchants have, perhaps even clerks and other such drudges. Certainly a journeyer has it. And in those last moments it will make you grieve—as Mordecai did—not for anything you have done in your lifetime, but for the things you never got to do.”
“Mirza Esther,” I protested. “A man cannot live always in dread of missing something. I fully expect never to be Pope, for instance, or Shah of Persia, but I hope that lack will not blight my life. Or my deathbed either.”
“I do not mean things unattainable. Mordecai died lamenting something that had been within his reach, within his capability, within his having, and he let it go by. Imagine yourself pining for the sights and delights and experiences you could have had, but missed—or even just one single small such experience—and pining too late, when it is forever unattainable.”
Obediently, I did try to imagine that. And young though I was, remote though I assumed that prospect to be, I felt a faint chill.
“Imagine going into death,” she went on implacably, “without having tasted everything in this world. The good, the bad, the indifferent even. And to know, at that final moment, that it was no one but you who deprived yourself, through your own careful caution or careless choice or failure to follow where your curiosity led. Tell me, young man, could there be any more hurtful pang on the other side of death? Even damnation itself?”
After the moment it took me to shake off the chill, I said, as cheerfully as I could, “Well, with the help of those thirty-six you spoke of, maybe I can avoid both deprivation in my lifetime and damnation after it.”
“Aleichem sholem,” she said. But, as she was swatting with her slipper at another scorpion at that moment, I was not sure if she was wishing peace to me or to it.
She moved on down the garden, turning over rocks, and I idly ambled into the stable to see if any of our party had returned from wandering about town. One of them had, but not alone, and the sight brought me up short, with a gasp.
Our slave Nostril was there, with a stranger, one of the gorgeous young Kashan men. Perhaps my conversation with the maidservant Sitarè had made me temporarily impervious to disgust, for I did not make violent outcry or retreat from the scene. I looked on as indifferently as did the camels, which only shuffled and mumbled and munched. Both of the men were naked, and the stranger was on his hands and knees in the straw, and our slave was hunched over his backside, bucking like a camel in rut. The lewdly coupling Sodomites turned their heads when I entered, but only grinned at me and kept on with their indecency.
The young man had a body that was as handsome to look upon as his face was. But Nostril, even when fully clothed, was of a repellent appearance, as I have already described. I can only say further that his paunchy torso and pimply buttocks and spindly limbs, when totally exposed, were a sight to make most onlookers retch up their most recent meal. I was amazed that such a revolting creature could have persuaded anyone the least bit less revolting to play al-mafa‘ul to his al-fa’il.
Nostril’s fa’il implement was invisible to me, being inserted where it was, but the young man’s organ was visible below his belly, and stiffened into its candelòto aspect. I thought that somewhat odd, since neither he nor Nostril was manipulating it in any way. And it seemed even more odd, when he and Nostril finally groaned and writhed together, to see his candelòto—still without benefit of touch or fondling—squirt spruzzo into the straw on the floor.