“Gul Ruh” were the first words that came to Ferhad’s mind, not particularly because he knew that girl was an Ottoman but because those had become his words meaning “That’s impossible!” Of course he did not say this to the Shadow of Allah. He merely bowed and said, “Master, I am your slave.”
LII
My master’s mausoleum was not as large as it had started out to be (how quickly the world forgets!) and it had a sort of amputated look. But the tile work was of the finest: blue and green forests espaliered against the walls and heavy with blossoms of that rich coral color that was recently born in Iznik and is such a closely guarded secret that it may well die there. Neglect had its benefits, however, for real vegetation promised soon to cover up the rough spots and take the edifice to itself as if it had always been there.
In small depressions in the marblework, rain water collected at which clouds of pigeons drank. Even in death, my master was proving generous. From the roof of plane trees above, herons had slung their nests like saucer lamps, and a recent molt had let a crest of feathers fall down upon the master’s cupola like nothing so much as the plume of the imperial turban itself.
A row of cypresses, those emblems of eternity, stood sentinel on either side, draped in ivy like shrouds. They kept back the rude press of staring, lesser monuments. Among these surrounding memorials, the men’s were topped with stone turbans in shapes that indicated what station the dead had held in life. Women’s stones were carved to end in flowers.
And, whereas in life all had bowed towards Mecca, in death they went every which way, depending on how the body beneath returned to the soil. Instead of the uniformity of death the preachers were always threatening us with—”The impious and heretic shall stand before their Maker and know the errors of their ways”—it seemed rather that life had enforced more compliance. And in death each relaxed into the individuality they had always cherished in their hearts but never dared while living.
Beyond these stones I could not see far: Heavy mist smeared the distance and then swallowed it whole. I shivered in the damp.
He appeared suddenly out of that mist and walked toward the mausoleum at a pace the heart takes when approaching a lovers’ tryst: quick, but of uneven rhythm. I remarked at once—he is as handsome and swift as ever. He was early, but I had been earlier, and from my post behind the cypress, I could watch his every move.
Waiting is not much practiced by Aghas of the Janissaries, but Ferhad Pasha had not forgotten the art learned so well by weeks under Sokolli Pasha’s roof with the fate of the Empire on his lips. Here he was under the Pasha’s roof again, and some of the same thrill was in this waiting, too: the youthful tantalization to be hopelessly, dangerously in love, near and yet so far.
He waited and I waited. I stood until my legs grew numb, cold slowly creeping up them from the mist-dampened grass. For one used to standing and watching most of every day, this was substantial evidence of the passage of time. But Ferhad Pasha still seemed insensible to it. That there was no sun to judge by was perhaps part of the reason, but here was a man with the responsibilities of all the army on his shoulders. Remembering this, I found his patience even more remarkable. It was hard to imagine: what devices he had used to slip from these responsibilities for the day, lingering now into long afternoon. But no call of duty seemed to disturb his waiting, no thought that he would miss something more important.
At last, the call of the muezzin came, seeping its way through the mist like blood through bandages, and Ferhad Pasha started from his heavy reverie. He had arrived just after the last call—a good four hours must have passed. He looked around in a sudden panic. Perhaps he felt himself confronted by Sokolli’s presence for the first time, surrounded by the ghosts of the others who slept all around. Perhaps he thought he must have missed something. It put a new focus on his eyes and he saw for the first time the basket set in the shadows just at the entrance to the tomb. He went to it, picked it up, saw it was not something left weeks ago by accident, but fresh, set just that morning.
He leapt down from the tomb in a moment, ran this way and that, calling, “My rose! My fountain! Esmikhan!” The mist swallowed his voice at the edge of sight.
I thought I might now be discovered but a step first to one side and then to the other prevented it. And Ferhad Pasha did not look very hard. His search was more a bodily reflex which all along his mind knew was vain.
The mind soon regained control and brought him slowly back to the steps of the tomb. Now he sat limply on the marble and looked long and hard at the basket’s contents. They were all fruit of the end of the present autumn season: a bunch of grapes gone to raisins with a long twig of vine attached, leaves dry and near to dust; an apple, red-cheeked like one sickly but having difficulty breathing; a pomegranate, packed with tears; a quince, the ascetic; almonds still in the husk, tight-lipped and reclusive; and a bouquet of marigold, basil, fenugreek, and forced jasmine. “Petals of the jasmine on fenugreek,” the poet says, “are like tears on a yellow face.”
Ferhad Pasha fingered the various fruits in turn. Their confused covey of
