“You are mad,” I wanted to tell him. “Love has made you mad.”
But he knew that. He knew better than I the tragedy it was for helplessness to overcome one of Turkey’s brightest hopes. So great was his intimacy with that tragedy that he could not but long for death. What use was there for appeals to reason? I spoke only more pleasantries as he bound his wrist with a scrap of his sash—”Got in the service of the Grand Vizier,” he attempted a little joke—and I accompanied him back to the palace.
Surely if Allah loves His people He will not let them lose such a wonderful defender of the Faith by his own hand for the sake of a woman, I thought as we walked. Surely He could not let one of the most devoted among His women pine away the rest of her life never knowing either the love of a man, nor the pleasure of a child, even when she had crossed all of Anatolia to pray for these things.
And yet, what right had I, a Venetian, and Ferhad, born an Albanian, to second-guess the will of the God of these people among whom we were strangers? And Esmikhan, though the daughter of the Sultan, had a Circassian mother. No doubt even she was undeserving of a special dispensation from this God’s age-old laws. Such thoughts kept the more rebellious ones in check.
Then, however, I thought of the sanction I had received—or thought I had received—from Husayn. A wandering dervish is considered by all to be the most beloved of Allah.
“Sometimes the man of Allah can best fulfill the will of the Merciful One not by obeying His laws but by breaking them.”
Still, I was not certain Husayn’s vision was altogether holiness. Sometimes, I feared, it was madness, too.
XXXIX
Thursday, Friday, Saturday came, following one another as they have since the world began. Saturday night. I surveyed my defenses as the general of a besieged town might walk along the parapet on the eve of an attack. I had insisted that my seconds keep watch through the night, waking in shifts so if the slightest noise came from the grille between the worlds, they would hear it. I tested the doors and the windows as if the enemy might try to break in with battle-axes. No, all was safe. The siege would be lifted tomorrow. We, the defenders, leaving rather than the attackers. And the only weakness was in my heart.
I went to bid my lady good night and found her weak with tears. She lay in the arms of the governor’s wife and his daughters, who had vowed to spend the night with her. They thought it was leaving them that caused her such sorrow and were doing everything they could to return the compliment to so great a lady.
I helped the slaves bring out bedding and went to lower the lights, but Esmikhan protested that she had no wish for sleep that night, and darkness would only haunt her more. Then I sat on, helpless, having no desire to return to my lonely room to face my conscience burdened by her flushed face and eyes, so puffy and bruised they looked as if someone had been beating her.
Outside the lattice at the window to her room, a nightingale began to sing. It was the first any of us had heard that year—sweet warbling like the quaver of a sob—and we all held our breath at the cool evening beauty of it. Poets say that the nightingale is the rose’s lover, but the two can never meet, for the rose is guarded by jealous thorns. Hence, the exquisite sadness of the bird’s song.
Had I not known it was impossible, I would have sworn this wild creature was the final farewell message of Ferhad to his own well-guarded beloved.
I have never heard a poet call the song of the nightingale the voice of Elias, and perhaps that would be considered blasphemy, but that is what it suddenly became to me. Seeming neither mortal nor yet quite divine, it taught me, or rather made me remember what I had learned the first time I stood in a head eunuch’s room and saw the two doors. Being neither male nor female, I was yet able to unite the two and make them whole. What power was there! It was divine, I could call it no other: to bring together what men had torn asunder, to create harmony out of discord and joy out of sorrow. By imposing the harem and all other separations between His creatures according to class, race, nationality, and species, Allah had created the discord and sorrow. Though these were necessary, they were only to teach us the opposites. If the work and glory of the God of Islam were not to finally show compassion and mercy, then I understood nothing of my adopted religion, nor of the one I had abandoned either.
The bird’s song also had a profound effect upon my lady, but, because she was only half of a whole, it sent her into a pit of even greater despair. She was too weak to give anymore force to her tears so they collapsed in upon her, and I thought perhaps she had fainted. The governor’s wife and her daughters cried out with sympathetic sorrow, and began to bathe my lady’s wrists and forehead with rosewater and rue.
I spoke to them, matching my words to the rhythm I heard from the nightingale. “Perhaps, my gracious hostess, it would be better if I spent the night with my lady. It would be less wearing upon your delicate selves and less sorrowful for her.”
The women were shocked and hurt. Would I deprive them of these last hours of joy and
