As he went he heard somebody say: “Are you sickened at the sight of blood?”
He glanced over his shoulder. It was the woman who’d spoken of the unholy books in Samarkand.
“No, I’m not sickened,” Zelim said sourly, thinking the woman was impugning his manhood. “I’m just bored. They’re dead. They can’t suffer any more.”
“You’re right,” the woman said with a shrug. She was dressed, Zelim saw, in widow’s clothes, even though she was still young; no more than a year or two older than he. “It’s only us who suffer,” the woman went on. “Only us who are left alive.”
He understood absolutely the truth in what she was saying, in a way that he could not have understood before his terrible adventure on the road. That much at least the monks had given him: a comprehension of somebody else’s despair.
“I used to think there were reasons . . .” he said softly.
The crowd was roaring. He glanced back over his shoulder. A head was being held high, blood running from it, glittering in the bright sun.
“What did you say?” the woman asked him, moving closer to hear him better over the noise.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Please tell me,” she replied, “I’d like to know.”
He shrugged. He wanted to weep, but what man wept openly in a place like this?
“Why don’t you come with me?” the woman said. “All my neighbors are here, watching this stupidity. If you come back with me, there’ll be nobody to see us. Nobody to gossip about us.”
Zelim contemplated the offer for a moment or two. “I have to bring my dog,” he said.
ii
He stayed for six years. Of course after a week or so the neighbors began to gossip behind their hands, but this wasn’t like Atva; people weren’t forever meddling in your business. Zelim lived quite happily with the widow Passak, whom he came to love. She was a practical woman, but with the front door and the shutters closed she was also very passionate. This was especially true, for some reason, when the winds came in off the desert; burning hot winds that carried a blistering freight of sand. When those winds blew the widow would be shameless—there was nothing she wouldn’t do for their mutual pleasure, and he loved her all the more for it.
But the memories of Atva, and of the glorious family that had come down to the shore that distant day, never left him. Nor did the hours of his violation, or the strange thoughts that had visited him as Nazar and his gang hung from the gallows. All of these experiences remained in his heart, like a stew that had been left to simmer, and simmer, and as the years passed was more steadily becoming tastier and more nourishing.
Then, after six years, and many happy days and nights with Passak, he realized the time had come for him to sit down and eat that stew.
It happened during one of these storms that came off the desert. He and Passak had made love not once but three times. Instead of falling asleep afterward, however, as Passak had done, Zelim now felt a strange irritation behind his eyes, as though the wind had somehow whistled its way into his skull and was stirring the meal one last time before serving it.
In the corner of the room the dog—who was by now old and blind—whined uneasily.
“Hush, girl,” he told her. He didn’t want Passak woken; not until he had made sense of the feelings that were haunting him.
He put his head in his hands. What was to become of him? He had lived a fuller life than he’d ever have lived if he’d stayed in Atva, but none of it made any sense. At least in Atva there had been a simple rhythm to things. A boy was born, he grew strong enough to become a fisherman, he became a fisherman, and then weakened again, until he was as frail as a baby, and then he perished, comforted by the fact that even as he passed from the world new fishermen were being born. But Zelim’s life had no such certainties in it. He’d stumbled from one confusion to another, finding agony where he had expected to find consolation, and pleasure where he’d expected to find sorrow. He’d seen the Devil in human form, and the faces of divine spirits made in similar shape. Life was not remotely as he’d expected it to be.
And then he thought: I have to tell what I know. That’s why I’m here; I have to tell people all that I’ve seen and felt, so that my pain is never repeated. So that those who come after me are like my children, because I helped shape them, and made them strong.
He got up, went to his sweet Passak where she lay, and knelt down beside the narrow bed. He kissed her cheek. She was already awake, however, and had been awake for a while.
“If you leave, I’ll be so sad,” she said. Then, after a pause: “But I knew you’d go one day. I’m surprised you’ve stayed so long.”
“How did you know—?”
“You were talking aloud, didn’t you realize? You do it all the time.” A single tear ran from the corner of her eye, but there was no sorrow in her voice. “You are a wonderful man, Zelim. I don’t think you know how truly wonderful you are. And you’ve seen things . . . maybe they were in your head, maybe they were real, I don’t know . . . that you have to tell people about.” Now it was he who wept, hearing her speak this way, without a trace of reprimand. “I have had such years with you, my love. Such joy as I never thought I’d have. And it’d be greedy of me to ask you for more, when I’ve had so much already.” She raised her head a little way, and kissed him. “I will love you better if you go quickly,” she said.
He started to sob. All the fine thoughts he’d had a few minutes before seemed hollow now. How could he think of leaving her?
“I can’t go,” he said. “I don’t know what put the thought in my head.”
“Yes you will,” she replied. “If you don’t go now, you’ll go sooner or later. So go.”
He wiped his tears away. “No,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So he stayed. The storms still came, month on month, and he and the widow still coupled fiercely in the little house, while the fire muttered in the hearth and the wind chattered on the roof. But now his happiness was spoiled; and so was hers. He resented her for keeping him under her roof, even though she’d been willing to let him go. And she in her turn grew less loving of him, because he’d not had the courage to go, and by staying he was killing the sweetest thing she’d ever known, which was the love between them.
At last, the sadness of all this killed her. Strange to say, but this brave woman, who had survived the grief of being widowed, could not survive the death of her love for a man who stayed at her side. He buried her, and a week later, went on his way.
He never again settled down. He’d known all he needed to know of domestic life; from now on he would be a nomad. But the stew that had bubbled in him for so long was still good. Perhaps all the more pungent for those last sad months with Passak. Now, when he finally began his life’s work, and started to teach by telling of his experiences, there was the poignancy of their soured love to add to the account: this woman, to whom he had once promised his undying devotion—saying what he felt for her was imperishable—soon came to seem as remote a memory as his youth in Atva. Love—at least the kind of love that men and women share—was not made of eternal stuff. Nor was its opposite. Just as the scars that Nazar and his men had left faded with the years, so had the hatred Zelim had felt for them.
Which is not to say he was a man without feeling; far from it. In the thirty-one years left to him he would become known as a prophet, as a storyteller and as a man of rare passion. But that passion did not resemble the kind that most of us feel. He became, despite his humble origins, a creature of subtle and elevated emotion. The parables he told would not have shamed Christ in their simplicity, but unlike the plain and good lessons taught by Jesus, Zelim imparted through his words a far more ambiguous vision; one in which God and the Devil were constantly engaged in a game of masks.
There may be occasion to tell you some of his parables as this story goes on, but for now, I will tell you only how he died. It happened, of course, in Samarkand.
&n
bsp; VI
Let me first say a little about the city, given that its glamour had fueled so many of the stories that Zelim had heard as a child. The teller of those tales, Old Zelim, was not the only man to dote on Samarkand, a city he had never seen. It was a nearly mythical place in those times. A city, it was said, of heartbreaking beauty, where thoughts and forms and deeds that were unimaginable in any other spot on earth were commonplace. Never such women as there; nor boys; nor either so free with their flesh as in Samarkand’s perfumed streets. Never such men of power as there; nor such treasures as men of power accrue, nor such palaces as they build for ambition’s sake, nor mosques they build to save their souls.
Then—if all these glories were not enough—there was the miraculous fact of the city’s very existence, when in all directions from where it stood there was wilderness. The traders who passed through it on the Silk Road to Turkistan and China, or carried spices from India or salt from the steppes, crossed vast, baking deserts, and freezing gray wastelands, before they came in sight of the river Zarafshan, and the fertile lands from which Samarkand’s towers and minarets rose, like flowers that no garden had ever brought forth. Their gratitude at being delivered out of the wastes they’d crossed inspired them to write songs and poems about the city (extolling it perhaps more than it deserved) and the songs and poems in their turn brought more traders, more beautiful women, more builders of petaled towers, so that as the generations passed Samarkand rose to its own legendary reputation, until the adulation in those songs and poems came to seem ungenerous.
It was not, let me point out, simply a place of sensual excesses. It was also a site of learning, where philosophers were extolled, and books written and read, and theories about the beginning of the world and its end endlessly debated over glasses of tea. In short, it was altogether a miraculous city.
Three times in his life Zelim joined a caravan on the Silk Road and made his way to Samarkand. The first time was just a couple of years after the death of Passak, and he traveled on foot, having no money to purchase an animal strong enough to survive the trek. It was a journey that tested to its limits his hunger to see the place: by the time the fabled towers came in sight he was so exhausted—his feet bloody, his body trembling, his eyes red-raw from days of walking in clouds of somebody else’s dust—that he simply fell down in the sweet grass beside the river and slept for the rest of the day there outside the walls, oblivious.
He awoke at twilight, washed the sand from his eyes, and looked up. The sky was opulent with color; tiny knitted rows of high cloud, all amber toward the west, blue purple on their eastern flank, and birds in wheeling flocks, circling the glowing minarets as they returned to their roosts. He got to his feet and entered the city as the night fires around the walls were being stoked, their fuel such fragrant woods that the very air smelt holy.
Inside, all the suffering he’d endured to get here was forgotten. Samarkand was all that his father had said it would be, and more. Though Zelim was little more than a beggar here, he soon realized that there was a market for his storytelling. And that he had much to tell. People liked to hear him talk about the baptism at Atva; and the forest; and Nazar and his fate. Whether they believed these were accounts of true events or not didn’t matter: they gave him money and food and friendship (and in the case of several well-bred ladies, nights of love) to hear him tell his tales. He began to extend his repertoire: extemporize, enrich, invent. He created new stories about the family on the shore, and because it seemed people liked to have a touch of philosophy woven into their entertainments, introduced his themes of destiny into the stories, ideas that he’d nurtured in his years with Passak.
By the time he left Samarkand after that first visit, which lasted a year and a half, he had a certain reputation, not simply as a fine storyteller, but as a man of some wisdom. And now, as he traveled, he had a new subject: Samarkand.
There, he would say, the highest aspirations of the human soul, and the lowest appetites of the flesh, are so closely laid, that it’s hard sometimes to tell one from the other. It was a point of view people were hungry to hear, because it was so often true of their own lives, but so seldom admitted to. Zelim’s reputation grew.
The next time he went to Samarkand he traveled on the back of a camel, and had a fifteen-year-old boy to prepare his food and see to his comfort, a lad who’d been apprenticed to him because he too wanted to be a storyteller. When they got to the city, it was inevitably something of a disappointment to Zelim. He felt like a man who’d returned to the bed of a great love only to find his memories sweeter than the reality. But this experience was also the stuff of parable; and he’d only been in the city a week before his disappointment was part of a tale he told.
And there were compensations: reunions with friends he’d made the first time he’d been here; invitations into the palatial homes of men who would have scorned him as an uneducated fisherman a few years before, but now declared themselves honored when he stepped across their thresholds. And the profoundest compensation, his discovery that here in the city there existed a tiny group of young scholars who studied his life and his parables as though he were a man of some significance. Who could fail to be flattered by that? He spent many days and nights talking with them, and answering their questions as honestly as he was able.
One question in particular loitered in his brain when he left the city. “Do you think you’ll ever see again the people you met on the shore?” a young scholar had asked him.
“I don’t suppose so,” he’d said to the youth. “I was nothing to them.”
“But to the child, perhaps . . .” the scholar had replied.
“To the child?” said Zelim. “I doubt he even knew I existed. He was more interested in his mother’s milk than he was in me.”
The scholar persisted, however. “You teach in your stories,” he said, “how things always come round. You talk in one of them about the Wheel of the Stars. Perhaps it will be the same with these people. They’ll be like the stars. Falling out of sight . . .”
“ . . . and rising again,” Zelim said.
The scholar offered a luminous smile to hear his thoughts completed by his master. “Yes. Rising again.”
“Perhaps,” Zelim had said. “But I won’t live in expectation of it.”
Nor did he. But, that said, the young scholar’s observation had lingered with him, and had in its turn seeded another parable: a morose tale about a man who lives in anticipation of a meeting with someone who turns out to be his assassin.
And so the years went on, and Zelim’s fame steadily grew. He traveled immense distances—to Europe, to India, to the borders of China, telling his stories, and discovering that the strange poetry of what he invented gave pleasure to every variety of heart.
It was another eighteen years before he came again to Samarkand; this—though he didn’t know it—for the last time.
VII
By now Zelim was getting on in years and though his many journeys had made him wiry and resilient, he was feeling his age that autumn. His joints ached; his morning motions were either water or stone; he slept poorly. And when he did sleep, he dreamed of Atva; or rather of its shore, and of the holy family. His life of wisdom and pain had been caused by that encounter. If he’d not gone down to the water that day then perhaps he’d still be there among the fishermen, living a life of utter spiritual impoverishment; never having known enough to make his soul quake, nor enough to make it soar.
So there he was, that October, in Samarkand, feeling old and sleeping badly. There was little rest for him, however. By now the number of his devotees had swelled, and one of them (the youth who’d asked the question about things coming round) had founded a school. They were all young men who’d found a revolutionary zeal buried in Zelim’s parables, which in turn nourished their hunger to see humanity unchained. Daily, he would meet with them. Sometimes he would let them question him, about his life, about his opinions. On other days—when he was weary of being interr
ogated—he would tell a story.
This particular day, however, the lesson had become a little of both. One of the students had said: “Master, many of us have had terrible arguments with our fathers, who don’t wish us to study your works.”
“Is that so?” old Zelim replied, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t understand why.” There was a little laughter among the students. “What’s your question?”
“I only wondered if you’d tell us something of your own father.”
“My father . . .” Zelim said softly.
“Just a little.”
The prophet smiled. “Don’t look so nervous,” he said to the questioner. “Why do you look so nervous?”
The youth blushed. “I was afraid perhaps you’d be angry with me for asking something about your family.”
“In the first place,” Zelim replied gently, “I’m far too old to get angry. It’s a waste of energy and I don’t have much of that left. In the second place, my father sits before you, just as all your fathers sit here in front of me.” His gaze roved the thirty or so students who sat cross-legged before him. “And a very fine bunch of men they are too.” His gaze returned to the youth who’d asked the question. “What does your father do?”
“He’s a wool merchant.”
“So he’s out in the city somewhere right now, selling wool, but his nature’s not satisfied with the selling of wool. He needs something else in his life, so he sends you along to talk philosophy.”
“Oh no . . . you don’t understand . . . he didn’t send me.”
“He may not think he sent you. You may not think you were sent. But you were born your father’s son and whatever you do, you do it for him.” The youth frowned, plainly troubled at the thought of doing anything for his father. “You’re like the fingers of his hand, digging in the dirt while he counts his bales of wool. He doesn’t even notice that the hand’s digging. He doesn’t see it drop seeds into the hole. He’s amazed when he finds a tree’s grown up beside him, filled with sweet fruit and singing birds. But it was his hand did it.”