The pavilions were practically buried in flowers. A fountain gurgled in the center of each of them, its streams of water falling to all sides and glinting in thousands of rainbow-like pearls. Food sat out on low, gilt tables, arranged on silver and gold trays. Braised fowl, baked fish, exquisitely prepared desserts and whole stacks of assorted fruit—figs, melons, oranges, apples, pears and grapes. Each table was surrounded with six jugs of wine. Off to the sides were dishes of milk and honey.
At the time of the fifth prayer Adi rowed Apama from garden to garden one last time. She inspected everything closely and then issued final instructions. She handed Miriam, Fatima and Zuleika two little balls each, for putting the visitors to sleep—the second in case the first wasn’t fully effective. As she left she spoke to them.
“Don’t give the boys a chance to ask too many questions. Keep them busy. Above all, get them drunk, because Sayyiduna is just and strict.”
Once she had left, the girls knew that the decisive moment was approaching. Their leaders told them to drink a cup of wine to bolster their courage.
Fatima’s pavilion was the most lively one. The girls stifled their nervous impatience by shouting and laughing. The magical lighting and the wine did their job. In numbers their fear dissipated. The pending visit roused no more than the shivering excitement of an unfamiliar adventure.
“His name is Suleiman and Sayyiduna said that he’s handsome,” Leila remarked.
“I think you’re already out to get him,” Sara sniffed at her.
“Look who’s talking, the horniest one in the bunch.”
“Let’s have Halima start,” Khanum suggested.
But Halima was nerve-wracked.
“No, no, I for sure won’t.”
“Don’t be afraid, Halima,” Fatima comforted her. “I’m responsible for our success, and I’ll tell each of you what to do.”
“Which of us is he going to fall in love with?” Aisha asked.
“Your wiles aren’t going to help you much,” Sara belittled her.
“And your black skin even less.”
“Stop arguing,” Fatima pacified them. “It doesn’t matter whom he falls in love with. We serve Sayyiduna, and our only duty is to carry out his orders.”
“I think he’s going to fall in love with Zainab,” Halima said.
“Why do you think that?” Sara asked angrily.
“Because she has such pretty golden hair and such blue eyes.”
Zainab laughed at this.
“Do you think he’ll be more handsome than Sayyiduna?” Halima persisted.
“Look at this little monkey,” Fatima exclaimed. “Now she’s gone and fallen in love with Sayyiduna.”
“I think he’s handsome.”
“Halima, at least for tonight don’t be stubborn. Sayyiduna isn’t for us. You mustn’t talk about him like that.”
“But he’s fallen in love with Miriam.”
Sara was furious.
“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 f
or 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.”
“I decided I would do everything humanly possible to make sure I didn’t fail. An idea like this grows and develops in the human soul like a baby in its mother’s body. At first it’s utterly helpless, it lacks a clear shape, it just provokes a passionate longing that drives you to persist. It has a tremendous power. It gradually haunts and possesses its bearer, so that he doesn’t see or think of anything else but it. His only desire is to embody it, to bring this wonderful monster into the world. With a thought like that in your gut, you really are like a madman. You don’t ask if it’s right or wrong, if it’s good or bad. You act on some invisible command. All you know is that you’re a means, in thrall to something more powerful than yourself. Whether that power is heaven, or whether it’s hell, you don’t care!”
“So all twenty years you didn’t even try to realize your plan? You didn’t even have a soul to share it with?”
Abu Ali couldn’t comprehend this. Hasan just laughed.
“If I had shared my plan with you or any of my friends, you would have thought I was a fool. I won’t deny that I did try, in my impatience, to realize it. Prematurely realize it, to be sure. Because subsequently I always realized that the obstacles that came across my path kept me from making irrevocable missteps. The first attempt to carry out my plan came shortly after Omar Khayyam provided it to me. You see, he had advised me to appeal to the grand vizier to fulfill his youthful vow and help me advance, as he’d already done for Omar. Nizam al-Mulk obliged me, as I’d expected. He recommended me to the sultan as his friend, and I was accepted into the court. You can imagine I was a more entertaining courtier than the grand vizier. I soon won the sultan’s favor, and he began advancing me ahead of the others. Of course, this was just grist for my mill. I was waiting for an opportunity to ask the sultan for the command of units in some military campaign. But I was still so naive that I didn’t reckon with the bitter jealousy that my successes aroused in my former schoolmate. I found it perfectly natural for the two of us to compete. But he took it as a great humiliation. This came out when the sultan wanted to have an account of all the income and expenses of his enormous empire. He asked Nizam al-Mulk how soon he could pull all the necessary numbers together. ‘I need at least two years to complete the task,’ the vizier estimated. ‘What? Two years?’ I exclaimed. ‘Give me forty days and I’ll have a meticulous list covering the whole land. Just give me your officials to work with.’ My classmate went pale and left the room without a word. The sultan accepted my proposal, and I was happy to have the chance to prove my abilities. I recruited all of my confidants throughout the empire for the job, and with their help and that of the sultan’s officials, I actually managed to collect the numbers on all the revenues and outlays in the country within forty days. When the deadline came, I appeared before the sultan with the records. I started to read, but I had barely gotten through a few pages when I realized that someone had substituted the wrong lists. I started stammering and tried to supply the missing information from memory. But the sultan had already noticed my confusion. He lost his temper and his lips began to tremble with rage. Then the grand vizier said to him, ‘Wise men have calculated that it would take at least two years to complete this task. So how else is a frivolous idiot who boasted he would complete it in forty days to answer, but with incoherent prattle?’ I could feel him laughing maliciously inside. I knew he had played this trick on me. But there was no joking with the sultan. I had to leave the court in disgrace and head for Egypt. In the sultan’s eyes I remained a shameless buffoon. Since then the grand vizier has been living in fear of my revenge, and he’s done everything to try to destroy me. That’s how the first chance to realize my plan fell through. And I don’t regret it. Because I greatly fear the birth would have been premature …”
“I’ve heard about your dispute with the grand vizier,” Abu Ali said. “But the story takes on a whole different aspect when you learn all its details. Now I understand why Nizam al-Mulk is such a mortal enemy of the Ismailis.”
“I encountered more favorable conditions in Egypt. Caliph Mustansir Billah dispatched Badr al-Jamali, the commander of his bodyguard, to meet me at the border. In Cairo I was greeted with highest honors as a martyr for the cause of Ali. Soon the whole situation was clear to me. Two parties had formed around the caliph’s two sons, each wanting to secure the succession for its protégé. The elder son, Nizar, was also the weaker one, like the caliph himself. The law was in his favor. I soon managed to get both him and his father under my influence. But I didn’t reckon with the determination of Badr al-Jamali. He was champion of the younger son, al-Mustali. When he realized I was beginning to overshadow him, he had me arrested. The caliph was frightened. I quickly realized this was no joking matter. I cast aside all the high-flying dreams I’d been nurturing for Egypt and agreed to board some Frankish ship. My fate was finally sealed on that boat. Out at sea I noticed that we weren’t sailing for Syria, as Badr al-Jamali had promised, but far out west along the coast of Africa. I knew everything would be lost if they put me ashore anyplace near Kairouan. Then one of the storms that are typical for that part of the
ocean started up. I had secretly received several bags of gold pieces from the caliph. I offered one of them to the captain if he would change course and put me ashore on the coast of Syria. He would have the perfect excuse that the storm had carried him off course. The gold tempted him. The storm kept getting worse and worse. The passengers, almost all of them Franks, began to despair. They prayed out loud and commended their souls to God. I, on the other hand, was so satisfied with the deal I’d made that I sat down in a corner and calmly ate some dried figs. They were amazed at my composure. They didn’t know we’d turned about and were heading in the other direction. In response to their questions I told them that Allah had told me we were going to land on the coast of Syria and nothing bad would happen to us along the way. That ‘prophecy’ came to pass, and overnight they saw me as a great prophet. They all wanted me to accept them as adherents of my faith. I was terrified by that unexpected success. I had just vividly demonstrated to myself what a tremendous force faith is, and how easy it is to awaken. You just need to know a little bit more than the ones who are supposed to believe. Then it’s easy to work miracles. These are the fertile grounds out of which the noble blossom of faith grows. Suddenly, everything was clear to me. Like Archimedes, in order to carry out my plan I would need a single fixed point, and the world would come unhinged. No honors, no influence over the masters of the world! Just a fortified castle and the means to alter it according to my concept. Then the grand vizier and the mighty of the world had better look out!”